xi.
secrecy with which the Druids concealed their doctrines from the vulgar; forbidding that they should be ever committed to writing, and upon that account not having so much as an alphabet of their own. In this, the institutions of Odin and the Gothic Scalds or Poets were quite the reverse. No barbarous people were ever so addicted to writing, as appears from the innumerable quantity of Runic inscriptions scattered all over the North; no barbarous people ever held letters in higher reverence, ascribing the invention of them to their chief Deity, and attributing to the letters themselves supernatural virtues.
From a very few rude and simple tenets originally, those wild fablers called scalds or poets had, in the course of eight or nine centuries, invented and raised an amazing structure of fiction. We must
