Across this monument of early engineering skill, with roadway swaying and vibrating to the passage of every vehicle, and bird’s-eye views up and down the glittering waterway, Anglesey is entered. On its shores to the right sprawls Menai village, with Beaumaris in the distance, and down beneath, on the left, lies the Isle of Benglas, with the oddly placed church of Llantysilio on it.

You cannot unmoved set foot in Mona, as this was called before ever it obtained its name of Isle of the Angles. It was the last retreat of the Druids before the advance of the Roman power, and from it they incited the Welsh tribes to resistance. It was in A.D. 61 that Suetonius Paulinus, the Roberts of that distant past, made his great march across Britain, with a resolution to finally crush their mystic power. His line of march followed the Watling Street, bringing him to the shores of the Menai Straits at Segontium, now identified with Carnarvon. Arrived there, his first care was to provide a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats where the Straits narrow, at a point now known as Port Dinorwic. When this was done, and all in readiness for crossing, he found the passage energetically disputed, and the unknown shores of the island lined with a terror-striking army of blue-stained Britons, white-robed Druids, and shrieking women clad in dark and dismal garments, with hair streaming wildly over their faces, and carrying torches. These ministering angels ran like furies up and down the rocks, and cursed; while the Druids prayed and cursed in one breath. These unusual sights and sounds so astonished the Roman soldiery that they gaped with dismay, and stood unnerved, an excellent mark for the javelins the enemy began to throw at them. They would probably have fled had it not been for their own general, who encouraged them by promising death to all who flinched. Death, therefore, being rather more of a certainty in the rear, they made a wild rush, closed with the howling mob, and completely defeated them. Many Druids were roasted on their own sacrificial altars that day, as just burnt-offerings to atone for the cruelty of a blood-stained religion that demanded living victims and divined events from the inspection of human entrails. The sacred groves of Mona were cut down, the altars demolished, and the island reduced to a conquered province.

Having said thus much, and given the views of the Druids and their practices popularly received, it is only fair to those ancients and to the respectable old gentlemen who, in these days of Celtic revivals and Eisteddfodau, become Arch Druids and things of that sort, and attend gatherings in mystic garments like nightshirts over their highly respectable tweed trousers and broadcloth frock-coats—it is only just and fair to say that Julius CÆsar, in his Commentaries, gives the Druids a very high character. The priests, he says, taught the immortality of the soul, and held truth to be the highest virtue. They were sound as priests, as legislators politic, and as philosophers enlightened and humane. We have nothing in the way of public men so good as this nowadays, and therefore we cannot but deplore the action of Suetonius Paulinus in wiping them off the face of the earth; and at the same time may hope that the Arch Druids and lesser Druids of modern summer gatherings in Wales, who look so supremely silly with laurel wreaths round their respectable old bald heads, and white whiskers and collars beneath—and would certainly not dream of auguring over any fellow-creature’s entrails—may get equal wisdom and political soundness.

There is on the Anglesey side, near Llanedwen, a field called “Maes Mawr Gad,” or the Field of the Great Army, marking the spot where Paulinus and his victorious host landed. The Roman general rested but a short while here, for the Druids had scarce been blotted out when the terrible news reached him of the revolt of the Iceni, and the massacre at Camulodunum. He hasted back, collecting an army of ten thousand on the way, and, leaving the young and old and defenceless of Verulamium to their fate, advanced into Essex and utterly defeated Boadicea.