Note 240 — Chapter III · THE MONASTIC CHURCH IN IONA.

Dr. John Hill Burton was the first to expose the utterly fictitious basis on which the popular conceptions of the so-called Druidical religion rests, and he has done it with much ability and acuteness in an article in the Edinburgh Review for July 1863, and in his History of Scotland, vol. i. chap. iv. But he undoubtedly carries his scepticism too far when he seems disposed to deny the existence among the pre-Christian inhabitants of Scotland and Ireland of a class of persons termed Druids. Here he must find himself face to face with a body of evidence which it is impossible, with any truth or candour, to ignore.