h race,
when oppressed and engaged in a desperate defence. She is earnest,
rugged, and terrible; the men who gathered round her were reckoned by
hundreds of thousands. But the Britons had not yet learnt the art of
war. A single onslaught of the Romans sufficed to scatter their
disorderly masses with a fearful butchery. It was the last day of the
old British independence. Boadicea would not, any more than Cleopatra,
adorn a Roman triumph; she fell by her own hand.

Within a few dozen years the Roman eagles were masters of Britain as
far as the Highlands: the Keltic clan-life and the religion of the
Druids withdrew into the Caledonian mountains, and the large islands
off that coast; in the conquered territory the religion of the arms
that had won the victory, and the might of the Great Empire, were
supreme. The work which was begun by superiority in war was completed
by pre-eminence in civilisation. It seemed an advantage and an
improvement to the sons of the British princes, to adopt the Roman
language, and knowledge, and mode of life; they delighted in the
luxury of colonnades, baths, feasts, and city life. Men like Agricola
used these modes of Romanising Britain by preference. Just as the
Britons exchanged their rude shipbuilding and their leathern sails for
the discoveries of a more advanced art of navigation, so they learnt
to carry on their agriculture in Roman fashion; in later times
Britain was considered as the granary of the legions in Germany. Most
of the cities in the land betray by their very names their Roman
origin; London, though it existed earlier, owes its importance to this
connexion. It was the emporium destined as it were by nature for the
peaceful commerce that now arose between the Western provinces of the
Empire. Once in the third century an attempt was made to make the
island independent, but it failed the moment the marts on the opposite
coast fell into the hands of the Emperor who was universally
recognised. Britain seemed an integral part of the Roman Empire. It
was from York that Constantine marched forth to unite its Eastern and
Western halves once more under one government.

But soon after him an epoch began in which the third great
nationality, at first thought to be part of the Keltic race, then
driven back or taken into service by the Romans, but always
maintaining its peculiar original independence--the German, rose to
supremacy in the West. In the fifth century it had become everywher