Crossword-Solution: BRITANNIAS 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

Our English antiquarians were used to dwell with rapture on the words of his panegyrist, “Britannias illic oriendo nobiles fecisti.” But this celebrated passage may be referred with as much propriety to the accession, as to the nativity of Constantine.

The statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than the Fames or the Britannias.

The eccentricity of level was endless, gardens topped roofs, gooseberry-bushes and plum-trees seemed growing out of chimneys, tall trees rose apparently from ridge-poles, and here and there against the sky appeared extraordinary wooden figures of colossal size, Mermaids and Britannias and Belle Savages, figure-heads of forgotten ships which old sea-captains out of commission had set up in their gardens to remind them of perils past.

Browne calls this a _dunghill_ oath:-- "With that the _Miller_ laughing brush'd his cloathes, Then swore by Cocke and other dung-hill oathes." _Britannias Pastorals_, lib.

How in the world he had stopped that shot and got rid of the ball with two Britannias literally hurling themselves upon him, he would never know.