“Illi Britannos ultra noti littora ponti,
Et cœruleos Scuto-Brigantes dare Romuleis,”
says he, in his satirical invective upon the death of Claudius. Here, you will observe, that the Britons and the Brigantes are opposed to one another, and marked out as distinct races. And to specify still further the origin of the Brigantes is the epithet Scuto[481] prefixed thereto, from Scuitte, the ancient mode of spelling Scythia.
Those Scoto-Brigantes were the persons who, having been driven from Spain by the conquests of Sesostris, poured in with multitudinous inundation upon the quietude of our Tuath-de-danaans, and wrested from them an island which, during their blissful reign, had eclipsed in sanctity even their former Iran.[482]
The language which they spoke differed in nothing from the Tuath-de-danaan, but that it was not quite so refined; and this feature of similarity silences at once the conjectures of Stillingfleet, Innes, and their followers, who would make those Scythians to be Scandinavians, merely because the letter S occurs as the initial and final of either name!
Why, sir, when the Scandinavians did really invade Ireland, which was not until the early centuries of the Christian era, the great obstruction to their progress was their ignorance of our tongue; whereas, when the Scythians arrived here, many ages earlier, our legends, our traditions, our histories, and our annals, unanimously and universally attest, that they used the same conversable articulation with that of the established dynasty.[483]
Where is the wonder, then, that we should find all the ancient names in the north of England, correspond to a nicety with those of the Irish? And which made Lhuydh, the author of the Archæologia, himself an Englishman, declare, “how necessary the Irish language is to those who shall undertake to write of the antiquity of the isle of Britain.”
But if Lhuydh was thus candid in the avowal of his conviction, he was not equally successful in the discovery of the relationship. From want of the true touchstone, he went on hypothesising! and came at last to the supposition—“that the Irish must at one time have been in possession of those English localities, and thence removed themselves into Ireland”—the exact opposite having been the fact.
To atone for my long digression from Mr. Whittaker, and his breakages, I will supply to you the derivations, as well of Britain as of Brigantia. The former is compounded of Bruit, tin; and tan, a country abounding in that metal, and corresponding to Cassiteris, assigned to it by the Greeks: and Brigantia, as before explained, being but a formative from Breo-cean, is compounded of Breo, which signifies fire; and cean, a head or promontory, meaning the head-land of fires; or that whereon such used to have been lighted for the convenience of mariners lying out at sea.[484]
Neither the Scythians, therefore, nor the Celts, had connection whatsoever, either of them, with the once-envied celebrity of this “island.”[485] The latter were the persons who, under the name of Fir-Bolgs, erected all the cromleachs spread over the country, the accomplishment of which bespeaks, it is true, an acquaintance with mechanics, of which the present artisans are altogether ignorant. And as the original of their denomination has never been elucidated, I embrace this opportunity of supplying the omission. It comes from bolog, which, in the Irish language signifies a paunch; and fir, a man; so that Fir-Bolg means the big-bellied man, being an evident allusion to their bodily configuration: and to this day Bolcaig is the epithet applied, vernacularly, to individuals of large girth or corpulent robustness, exactly corresponding to what we are told by Cæsar, when describing the tripartite division of Gaul, viz. that the Belgæ, who, in fact, were of the same stock as our Fir-Bolgs, were the stoutest bodied, and the bravest otherwise of all its inhabitants.
The Scythian religion, which was Druidical, accorded with that of the Fir-Bolgs, which was Celtic—not less as to modes of worship, than in mutual aversion to that of the Iranians; and, accordingly, we find, that when both conspired for the recovery of this country from the Iranians, who had themselves wrested it from the Fir-Bolgs, antecedently, these latter branching out into the septs of Cauci and Menapii, corresponding to the kindred and cognominal tribes on the continent; and who, during the occupancy of the Iranians—the interval of Ireland’s Hyperborean renown—had retired to Arran[486] and the northern isles, were restored to a partnership in the possession of the island, in return for the assistance they lent the Scythians for its conquest: and this accounts for that diversity of races which Ptolemy records, but which antiquarian luminaries, unable to comprehend, took upon them to reject as altogether a chimera.