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writing peculiar to a simple and gross people, who were unacquainted with any rules of composition, and whose vigorous imagination, despising or not knowing any rules of art, displays itself in all the liberty and energy of nature.
It was thus the world was created; or to express it in a manner, more conformable to the Celtic notions, It was thus that the matter already existing but without order and without life, was animated and disposed by the Gods in the present state in which we behold it. I have already remarked, that they were far from supposing that after it had received the first motion from the hands of the Gods, the world continued to subsist, and to move independent of its first movers. Perhaps no religion ever attributed so much to a divine providence as that of the northern nations. This doctrine served them for a key, as commodious, as it was universal, to unlock all the phænomena of nature without exception. The intelligencies united to different bodies, penetrated and moved them; and men needed not to look any farther than to them, to find the cause of every thing they observed in them. Thus entire nature animated and always moved immediately by one or more intelligent causes, was in their system nothing more
