Mind was
on the alert, not only subsidizing the present, but looking curiously into
the past. I have ventured to call it the antiquarian age. In 1751, the
Antiquarian Society of London was firmly established; men began to collect
armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck,
who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,--armor, fosses,
and _praetoria_,--and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or
delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton,
"despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the
madman who fell in love with Cleopatra."
There was manifestly a great temptation to adventurous men--with
sufficient learning, and with no high notion of honor--to creep into the
distant past; to enact, in mask and domino, its literary parts, and
endeavor to deceive an age already enthusiastic for antiquity.
Thus, in the third century, if we may believe the Scotch and Irish
traditions, there existed in Scotland a great chieftain named Fion na
Gael--modernized into Fingal--who fought with Cuthullin and the Irish
warriors, and whose exploits were, as late as the time of which we have
been speaking, the theme of rude ballads among the highlands and islands
of Scotland.
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