The

London was at that time a place of some trade, and had begun to be peopled when it had become a permanent position of the invading force. Unable to resist their march, unable to hold London against their assault, the surprised and humiliated Romans left the town to its fate. enraged Gaels, bitterer probably against their acquiescent countrymen than their foreign foes, put every inhabitant to the sword. Verulam (or St. Albans) shared the same fortune, and the terrified annalists of Rome give the number of the victims of this frightful massacre at seventy thousand souls. But cruelty always brings its own revenge. The Romans were not to be outdone even in slaughter, and when Boadicea and her defenders were defeated in a great engagement near London, and the heroic queen had saved herself from worse calamities by a dose of poison, the rage of the conquerors knew no bounds. There were injuries on both sides which banished all lenity from their hearts. The destruction of seventy thousand by the Gaels in their insurrection against their masters, was returned to them by the death of eighty thousand Britons, slain either in the heat of battle as untameable enemies, or in cold blood after the victory as doubtful friends.

§ 8. Great wisdom and forbearance were required to heal the wounds which were embittered by so many recollections, and precautions were taken against the recurrence of discontent. The dangerous parts of the population were draughted away to all quarters of the widespread empire of Rome. All the young men whom the centurions could allure to embrace a military life, were formed into garrisons in far distant towns, and thousands of the Brigantes from York and Durham, the wild Silures from Wales and Monmouth, and the Cornavii from Cheshire and Salop, were ere long guarding the southern banks of the Danube against the advancing Goths, or keeping watch over the uneasy Persians across the Euphrates. Illyrians, Syrians, Spaniards, and specimens of

A.D. 78-84.]

AGRICOLA.

19

all the peoples who owned the imperial sway, from the Atlantic to the Propontis, were imported in the same manner into these distant isles. Cohorts accordingly of every name and kindred then known in the eastern world might be found gathered round the Roman eagles throughout the whole of the present England and a part of Scotland, from the strong castle of Richborough, near Deal, to the fortresses on the Forth and Clyde. The fittest man to inaugurate the new policy of clemency and civilization was Agricola, who was appointed to the British command in the year 78.

§ 9. A picture is drawn of this great soldier and statesman by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, in which, amid all the flattery of affection, and the satire which the portrait of a good and generous man was intended to be upon a generation in which goodness and generosity were unknown, it is easy to trace the true lineaments of a just and sagacious leader. In seven campaigns, from the year 78 to 84, the benefits of a strong hand and benevolent will were shown throughout the island. The more intelligent of the natives began to perceive something far more valuable in the regulated freedom of their Roman conquerors, than the wild absence of law and order which they called liberty. They clustered round the Castra, where justice was administered in the grand language which Cicero had ennobled in pleading the cause of dethroned kings and oppressed populations-where they saw the wonders of Grecian art ornamenting the walls and floors of the proprætor's dwelling-where the majestic toga of the civil officer had greater respect paid to it than the military cloak of the tribune; and lost in surprise, or fired with emulation at all these things, they despised the mental poverty of their former state; and we learn that many British chieftains at this time became masters of the Latin tongue, and affected Roman manners and tastes. Tacitus, whose hatred of the tyranny of his time makes him savagely devoted to the untrammelled happiness of a barbarian life,

attributes to Agricola the cunning design of keeping the Britons in subjection, by effeminizing their minds with poetry and the arts. He encouraged them to build spacious houses and noble temples; to adopt the Roman dress, and to taste all the pleasures of luxury and vice. What Tacitus calls luxury and vice, were probably immense improvements both. in life and morals upon the brutalized habitudes of the woods from which they had emerged. They probably ate cooked food instead of raw meat, and cheated each other in trade instead of murdering their enemy from behind a tree, and selling his wives and daughters into slavery. But this amount of vice and luxury was required to qualify the Britons for a still higher rise in the scale of education; for the time was at hand when those primeval children of the caves and forests were to receive the light of Christian truth.

§ 10. What fitter preparation could there be than the spread of the Roman language and the security guaranteed to them by the Roman conquest? The universal diffusion of the Greek literature and Roman power was as evidently a providential arrangement for the conveyance of the message of salvation as the creation of the all-encasing air for the existence of animated beings. In the head-quarters of the general, and round the smaller encampments of the inferior chiefs, those two prevailing tongues were familiarly known. Latin was the language of law, and religion, and authority. Greek was the language of subtle thought and high philosophy-it contained all that the wisdom of mankind had heaped up in the course of two thousand years, and-newest of its treasures, and more valuable than the wealth of Homer and of Plato-it contained the narrative of the Saviour's life and sacrifice. Some of the Gospels were already known; but in the mixed multitude of soldiers who served in Britain, there must have been many who had heard the glad tidings from Peter and Paul; and it is not a great stretch of the imagination to believe that some of the grey-haired veterans

A.D. 78-84.]

INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

21

who were garrisoned in Colchester or St. Albans, might have witnessed the plaiting of the crown of thorns and seen the Cross on Calvary. However this may be, there is no doubt that during this period the Christian faith made progress in our land. It had, indeed, no very dangerous rival to its progress; for the used-up gods of Druidism had died a natural death, and the deities of Olympus had long lost their hold on the credulity of mankind. Jupiter and Venus, Mercury and Apollo, had been so symbolized away that the ignorant could easily perceive the wise and learned had ceased to believe in them as real powers. It did not matter to the peasant whether Jupiter was an emblem of power and Venus of beauty. The believing mind cannot be satisfied with emblems, and longs for something true and solid on which to rest its hopes. The result at first was that the one sole power recognised in fane and temple as all-powerful and divine, was the power of the base and wicked monster who might happen at the time to fill the imperial throne. The image of Nero was more worshipped, the altar of Domitian heaped with richer gifts, than those of the old divinities. But still stranger was the ending of that other and more debasing superstition that had filled the baskets at Stonehenge with human victims. Of all the triumphs of agriculture, this is the greatest, that it overthrew a national faith, not by violence or hostility, but by its mere progress in clearing the country and reclaiming the soil. The Druidic deities lived in the depths of woods, upon the margins of marshy expanses, and spread a supernatural horror through the hearts of their adorers by the gloom and mysteriousness of their dismal retreats. But Agricola-in the double sense of that noble name—arose and put the wretched brood to flight. The marshes were drained, the wood was cut down, the sunshine poured into its recesses, and the dreadful Taranis, or omnipotent Thoth, was found to be no more terrifying than a death's-head lantern in the blaze of day. If a savage ceases to fear his gods, he despises them.

Long-bearded priests pretending to see visions at the farther end of caves, and to gather wisdom from bunches of mistletoe, were found out to be wretched impostors when the cave was turned into a granary of corn, and the oak that nourished the mistletoe had been cut down to fence a field. There were large tracts of country all round the stations of the Roman armies where the harvests were sown, and reaped, and gathered in peace. The wives and families of the soldiers came over to join them in their island quarters, and at last, colonists in the true sense of the word, removed their goods and household hopes from Italy or Cisalpine Gaul, and established themselves as permanent occupiers and owners of the soil. What Canada or Australia is to us, Warwickshire and Essex were to the overcrowded or impoverished inhabitants of the Milanese and Naples. They came over to seek new employment for their skill and labour-they ploughed, and wove, and painted -built noble galleys for the protection of the shore, and elegant carriages for traffic on the roads.

§ 11. Mighty changes had taken place upon the communication between camp and camp since the days of the unsocial Gael. Broad highways, with a noble disdain of engineering difficulties, went on, straight as an arrow from the bow, to the point they aimed at. Climbing steep hills or sinking into valleys, turning neither to the right nor left, the wonderful flight was pursued. Raised eighteen inches at the centre, the road admitted of drainage to the ditch at each side; the materials were massive blocks of stone; the workmanship extraordinary for its care and finish; and thousands of thoughtless travellers have trotted or rolled along these solid and enduring causeways without considering their obligations to the real conquerors and civilizers of the land. The ancient inhabitants are supposed to have had some pathways of communication between the remote districts of the south. But it was the Romans, who knew the value of good roads, both morally and politically, who converted the rude levellings of