have
held Britain as long as they did. For on sea and land, on the verge of
the civilization they maintained, were restless tribes, Scots, Picts,
and Saxons, seizing every pretext, every moment of unguardedness, for
encroachment and disturbance.

So that their stern discipline was necessary, and not without results
which went for further good. Under Roman rule all the surface of the
land was changed. Great towns, walled and fortified, rose on the sites
of ditch-surrounded villages. Marshes were drained, bridges were built,
and rivers banked; forests were cleared and waste lands reclaimed. More
than all, the land was tilled and rendered productive, so that Britain
became the most important grain province of the empire. Romans found in
Britain a scant supply of corn, grasses on which the cattle fed, wild
plums, a few nuts and berries. They brought to Britain fruits and
vegetables from many lands beyond the seas; from Italy gooseberries,
chestnuts, and apples; walnuts from Gaul; apricots, peaches, and pears
from Asia. Paved roads webbed the island, wide and well-drained, by
which bodies of troops could be massed at any given point with
incredible rapidity. Fortifications were built and in the north walls of
solid masonry were thrown across the country from the Oceanus Ibernicus
to the Oceanus Germanicus, for the determent of common foes.

That upon which Rome once set her seal could never wholly lose the mark;
must remain bound to her by ties, which, stretching across the
centuries, would link the future to the past. In spite of the bitterness
of her defeat and ruin, and because she still was Rome, she was mighty
enough to leave precious gifts to the peoples who should come after her.
To Britain, because Britain had been her own, she left many legacies
great and small: the sonorous richness of her speech, soon corrupted to
make for a new world a new speech as noble; and more than all, she left
the word of her mighty law, proudest monument ever reared by mortal
hands to a nation's glory. Rome's sons builded well for her; and the
labor of their hearts and hands was not for the day alone, but for the
ages. Towns yet to rise upon the ashes of her stately cities would find
their model in her municipal government, and in her laws concerning the
taxation of land and the distribution of personal and real estate. Old
customs she left to be handed down to those who should sit in her sons'
places,--the luctus of widows, who for a fu