lisle, being anxious during his leisure to explore the lakes of Cumberland on the one side, or the range of the Cheviots on the other. If, then, he turns to the left, and winds his way to the lakes of Cumberland, and ascends the last hill above the lake of Derwentwater, and sees that fair prospect opened before him, he will, on the summit of that hill, find himself amongst the circle of Druids' stones. Now, to those who have not attended to any of the details of the Druids, as Cæsar and Tacitus record them, and as so many modern writers may, if you will, make familiar to you—to those who therefore felt no interest in the Druids, the circle of those stones would seem nothing but a ring of moss-grown fragments of rock, and would be dismissed without a parting thought.
But what pleasure would their contemplation afford to him who had imbued his mind, in some measure, with some of the strange traditions that relate to the rude faith of our forefathers; and how much interest would he feel among those very stones in recalling some traces of their bloody rites or fantastic superstitions! Can you doubt for a moment, which traveller, in this case, would enjoy the greater pleasure?
Or, on the other hand, had the traveller gone to the right, along the foot of the Cheviots, he would at nearly every step encounter the remains of the majestic Roman wall. There again, to any one who was indifferent to archæological pursuits, these remains would seem only so many tufts of matted ivy, and so many heaps of cemented bricks. But he who knew something already, and might wish to know more, of the traces of that wonderful people who fortified an island as we would a town—who constructed works whose magnificence in ruin even now astonishes us—such a traveller would
