having been built, according to ancient tales, by Hercules, as
monuments set up to mark the extreme limits of his western wanderings.
Brutus passed through the strait, and then, turning northward, coasted
along the shores of Spain.

At length, after enduring great privations and suffering, and
encountering the extreme dangers to which their frail barks were
necessarily exposed from the surges which roll in perpetually from
the broad Atlantic Ocean upon the coast of Spain and into the Bay of
Biscay, they arrived safely on the shores of Britain. They landed and
explored the interior. They found the island robed in the richest
drapery of fruitfulness and verdure, but it was unoccupied by any
thing human. There were wild beasts roaming in the forests, and the
remains of a race of giants in dens and caves--monsters as diverse
from humanity as the wolves. Brutus and his followers attacked all
these occupants of the land. They drove the wild beasts into the
mountains of Scotland and Wales, and killed the giants. The chief of
them, whose name was Gogmagog, was hurled by one of Brutus's followers
from the summit of one of the chalky cliffs which bound the island
into the sea.

The island of Great Britain is in the latitude of Labrador, which on
our side of the continent is the synonym for almost perpetual ice and
snow; still these wandering Trojans found it a region of inexhaustible
verdure, fruitfulness, and beauty; and as to its extent, though often,
in modern times, called a little island, they found its green fields
and luxuriant forests extending very far and wide over the sea. A
length of nearly six hundred miles would seem almost to merit the
name of continent, and the dimensions of this detached outpost of
the habitable surface of the earth would never have been deemed