Search -
A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning With the History of Abaris, the Hyperborian, Priest of the Sun
A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning With the History of Abaris the Hyperborian Priest of the Sun Author:John Toland General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1815 Original Publisher: Printed by John Findlay Description: "Containing an account of the druids; or the priests and judges, of the vaids, or the diviners and physicians; and of the bards, or the poets and heralds; of the ancient Gauls, Britons, Irish and Scots." Subjects: Dru... more »ids and Druidism Mythology, Celtic Celts Bards and bardism Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 35 Mr. TOLAND's CHARACTER. It is difficult to determine in what department of Literature this great man most excelled. He seems to have been a kind of universal genius. -- In controversy he was irresistible; and, at the very moment when his adversaries thought they had confuted him, they found they had only furnished materials for their own degradation. -- He was skilled in more than ten Languages, and the Celtic was his native tongue. -- To the Revolution in 1689, he was a warm and steady friend. -- Real and unaffected piety, and the Church of Scotland; which he thought bore the greatest resemblance to the primitive simplicity of the Apostlic times, always found in him, an able, and inflexible advocate, -- Though his pen was his estate, yet he never prostituted it to serve the interest of his party, at the expence of truth. -- There was interwoven with his whole frame, a high degiee of stubborn and inexorable integrity, which totally unfitted him for the tool of a party ; and, like poor Yorick, he invariably called things by their right names, regardless of the consequences. -- There was not in his whole composition, one single grain of that useful quality which Swift calls modern discretion. Like an impregnable rock in the midst of the tempestuous ocean, he stood immov...« less