ll year of widowhood might
not wed again; the names of her deities she gave to the days of the
planetary week. Her superstitions and folk-lore, deep-rooted, survived
and lingered long among many nations: the old sorcery of the waxen image
of an enemy transfixed by bodkins for the torment of that enemy; the
belief in the were-wolf (one of the oldest of Roman traditions); the
association of the yew tree with mourning and the passing of human
souls.

Britain, with all her virgin wealth unmined, furnished Rome with
enormous food supplies; sent many thousand men to serve with Roman
armies on the continent; and received the colonists, called auxiliaries,
brought thither in accordance with Rome's invariable policy of
transplanting to the land of one nation captives from another. Thus the
population of Britain, composed of people from nearly every race or
tribe which has been subdued by Rome, was strangely heterogeneous, yet
as strangely fused. It was Romanized; the national individuality of its
units was lost in that of their conqueror. But as Rome destroyed the
nationality of her captives, so in time she inevitably destroyed her
own. If they were Romanized, she was Gothicized and Gaulicized. But by
this means only was the circulation of her life-currents maintained to
the uttermost branches of the empire. That great empire, age-old,
rotting inwardly almost to decay, was vitalized, as it were
galvanically, against her approaching dissolution by the blood of her
colonies. In the throes of hierarchical government, torn by three
irreconcilable religions,--polytheistic, Julian or Augustan, and
Christian,--she had no strength to spare for these outsiders when her
own life was at stake. The story of Roman Britain is the old story which
history repeats down all the ages: Rome sacrificed one part of Europe
that the whole might not be lost, and offered up the few for the good of
the greater number.

For in those dark days from the second century of the Christian era
until near the close of the fifth, when came the last stage of the
struggle and the extinction of the Empire of the West, the world seemed
tottering to its ruin. Kingdoms shook and crumbled to their fall; new
powers strove headlong for their seats; men found themselves harried on
all sides, with no pause for respite, and harried again in turn. They
did not understand; they knew only that fierce unrest possessed all the
earth, manifesting itself in the terrible wandering o