and considerable advances in the arts of life among the tribes of Britain. Perhaps the remembrance of a common danger had led them to a closer union among themselves; larger bodies we perceive are brought into the field; and the maintenance of an army is the surest proof of agricultural wealth and the consolidation of power. Savages have no commissariat and no government. We find also, when the curtain next draws up, that the feminine character is greatly elevated, and the female virtues appreciated. Savages have no respect for women, and no reverence for the purity and gentleness which supply the want of physical strength. § 7. Little is known of the domestic life of our predecessors in those years of literary eclipse. Their Druids or priests, we are told by Cæsar, were their leaders in council and instructors in sacred things. On great plains, like the downs of Wiltshire, vast enclosures were made in the form of an amphitheatre, and within the circle the solemn business of the community was transacted. Thousands of spectators, seated on the outer embankment, commanded a view of all that was going on; and councils of war and peace, of alliance and opposition, were held before all the people. We still see pictures of the long-bearded priests, clothed in loosely-flowing mantles, and bearing the sickle in their hands, with which they cut the mysterious and holy mistletoe found in the forests and sentimental antiquaries have lavished their praises on an organization by which religion was introduced into the commonest affairs of life. It would be well, perhaps, to inquire what the religion was before they rejoice in its universal diffusion. It was a faith originally derived from the wild and tangled wildernesses of some uncultivated and barbaric land, and retained traces of its origin in the bloodthirsty ceremonies by which it imposed upon the people. It was a system of ambitious and unprincipled priestcraft, by which the liberty of thought and action was entirely done away. A sacred caste ruled over chief and peasantry, as the THE DRUIDS. 9 B.C. 55—A.D. 43.] insolent and pampered Brahmins of Bengal affect a superiority over the ordinary Hindoos. Personal suffering, and the offering of riches on the shrines of their vengeful deities, increased the officiating dignitaries' influence and wealth. For when they proclaimed a human sacrifice to appease or gratify the gods, persons of all ranks and ages were equally exposed to the selection of the priest, and, mingled with malefactors and even with voluntary victims, they were enclosed in wicker baskets of enormous size, and slowly burned to death. Their temples were in the neighbourhood of those mounds of assembly, and were composed of circles of rough and prodigious stones, scientifically arranged, with some allusion to the movement of the heavenly constellations, and presenting altars called cromlechs, of two upright pillars, supporting a slab laid horizontally on the top. Whether a lower stone was used as the place of bloody sacrifice, antiquaries are not agreed; but it is ascertained that, in addition to the victims who were burnt, there was another class, who were put to death with the consecrated knife. All round these amphitheatres and temples the graves of the superstitious natives are still found. They form the little tumuli now called barrows, of which we have already spoken; and when we encounter one of them in our excursions, or possess several of them in our parish, we are to remember that they are characteristic of the period of the Celtic or Gaelic occupation, and of the Druidic supremacy. They are opened by the curious every day, and the things found in them give us some idea of the manners and beliefs of the time. The chieftain is buried either after being burnt on a funeral pyre, and his ashes collected into a vase, or simply interred in a stone coffin, surrounded in both cases with the possessions he had loved on earth-his weapons or ornaments, his brass sword, or coloured glass beads. In some there have been found articles of greater artistic skill-bracelets and buckles, in silver and even in gold, which bespeak greater wealth in the possessors, and a higher range of civilization. But the general level was still very low. The ordinary inhabitants lived in huts, which were scarcely discoverable, so diminutive was their size and rough their material; so low that the occupiers had to enter them on hands and knees, they were shaped like enlarged beehives, and owed their protection from wind and rain to a little thatch spread over the conical roofs. A naked barbarian, coloured with the juice of woad, and tattooed like the South Sea islanders, was the type of the common inhabitant of the land. The chiefs might be more nobly housed, the populations on the coast might be more civilized, and we hear of walled cities, which give an idea of power and order. But the name of city was lavishly bestowed on the smallest collection of miserable huts. The Druids, whose faith was essentially opposed to the growth of towns and the progress of agriculture, were masters of all, and prolonged their baleful supremacy by the degradation of the other classes. § 8. It is, therefore, with no feeling of patriotic indignation that we hear of the second Roman attempt at our subjugation and improvement. Claudius, one of the most brutal and cruel in the long list of brutal and cruel Emperors of Rome, sent Aulus Plautius, in the year 43, to recover the former conquest of Julius, and annex it permanently to the imperial throne. That it was no slight or temporary invasion which was now meditated is proved by the choice made in the same year of the best general of the Roman armies to command the expedition, and the visit to the newly-occupied region of the Emperor himself. For sixteen days the master of the Roman world resided in our isle-was present at the capture of Camelodunum, which is generally supposed to be either Colchester or Maldon, in Essex; and by a triumph on his return to the capital, put his seal on the commencement of the Roman occupation of Britain. Triumphs had indeed lost their value in the eyes of reflective citizens, when they were no longer proofs of military skill and discipline. An emperor, A.D. 43.] INVASION BY CLAUDIUS. 11 without talent or courage, sate in his gorgeous chariot and ascended the Sacred Way amid as jubilant acclamations as when the whole population "Climbed up to walls and battlements, To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome." But there was another reason for impressing the people with feelings of joy and pride on account of the annexation of our poor and thinly peopled isle. The conquest, barren as it might be of political or commercial results, was a fulfilment of the intentions of the founder of the imperial race, whose ambition was as unfailingly the inheritance of his successors as his name. It was enough to justify any enterprise that it had entered into the designs of Julius; and although his triumphs and aggressions were the expiring efforts of the old republic and the cause of its final overthrow, it was considered indispensable to show that the empire had equal power in adding to the Roman territory. Some few admirers of the vanished form of government might deplore the extinction of liberty, barbaric and ignorant as it was, even in the instance of so remote an island as Britain; but the cultivated and uncomplaining populations of the subject states felt an alleviation of their own dependent condition when they saw another people brought within the sphere of polished life and owning the same master with themselves. 12 BOOK II. THE ROMAN OCCUPATION. FROM A.D. 44 TO A.D. 418. § 1. The Roman Empire.—§ 2. Vespasian. Advance of the Romans into Hampshire and the interior.-§ 3. Ostorius Scapula. His advance to the Severn. The Romans establish themselves.-§ 4. Caractacus defeated and taken prisoner.—§ 5. Reign of Nero. Paulinus Suetonius appointed Proprætor. Isle of Anglesey. Opposition of the Druids. § 6. Religious toleration of the Romans. Their slaughters. -87. Boadicea. Defeated and slain.-§ 8. Extension of the Roman conquests from the Castle of Richborough, in Kent, to the fortresses on the Forth and the Clyde.-§ 9. Agricola. His high character and victorious career.-§ 10. The Roman language and literature. Introduction of Christianity.-§ 11. Roman arts and improvements. The four great Roman roads.-§ 12. The Caledonians defeated by Agricola.-§ 13. Peaceful rule of the Romans. The Picts' wall built by the Romans. Albinus. § 14. The Rebel Carausius. § 15. Pudens, the noble British lady, and a Christian. Roman Pantheism and Civilization.-§ 16. Constantius. His son Constantine the Great.-§ 17. General state of Britain. Exposed to the attacks of the northern barbarians.-§ 18. Roman Remains. § 1. THE Roman Empire at this time presents a double aspect to the historic student. At home the spirit of the grand old people who had subdued the world was totally destroyed. The populace who crowded the forum, and howled their gratification at the bloodstained scenes of the arena, were ruled over by a succession of monsters in human form, whose vices and even whose cruelties endeared them to the congenial minds of the degraded multitude. The vast city, with all its palaces and towers, and the great recollections which made its name something sacred and ennobling in the ears of the most distant populations, was itself a prey to the wildest |