tery in ruins; the Padwick Lanes and Paddington, or Potton, which a short search has enabled me to discover, and a list redolent of the most ancient mythology, and which no doubt a stricter search awakened to the subject, would materially enlarge for every county in our island. The names all centre in Shakspeare's Puck, of whose mythology I have endeavoured to give an account in the first volume of a work I have published.[1]
This may at present suffice for determining the oldest rites and purpose of the Kingstone in Surrey; and as the architect is often forced to collect from scattered relics of a building the form and outline of its various parts when perfect, so here, in ascertaining the ancient rites and ceremonies with which our fragment was connected, it was necessary to compare it, and the legends or memorials concerning it, with those of other countries and distant ages; and it does not seem too bold an assumption, that it was originally a sacred Morasteen, placed beside twelve others in a larger surrounding circle of various multiples of twelve; that it was peculiarly consecrated, and served as the inauguration-stone, or throne, at the election of a chief, perhaps an arch-Druid, or pontiff king, on which he was seated to receive the homage and acclamations of the multitude, at a period long previous to the invasion of Britain by the Roman arms, and which imagination may stretch to an era equivalent with the oldest of the Etruscan polities, perhaps as early as the very first immigrations of the aborigines who set their foot on the verdant isles of the West, migrating from the cradle of mankind, the plains of Shinaar, in the far East. The latest and most circumstantial account of this Morasteen is contained in Mr. W. Chambers's "Tracings of the North of Europe," contained in his own Edinburgh
- ↑ Vide "Shakespeare's Buck and his Folk'slore, illustrated from the Superstitions of all Nations, but more especially from the earliest Religion and Rites of Northern Europe and the Wends," printed for the Author.
