of the place-names have even given rise to a
suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not
capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of
pronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my own very simple
purpose. And indeed their importance has been very much exaggerated.
Caesar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; but
when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turned
Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular
indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What
they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and
given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that
matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know
that in a short time they were Roman.

Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragment
such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than
increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is
still very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like
writing a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be
a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing
about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are
Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for they
are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than
a row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but
grown like fungoids upon this original work of man; and our woods are
mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and the
roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and
brick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers are
the colours of a Roman pavement.

Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she
has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial.
What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or
no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened
immediately after. Being Roman did _not_ mean being subject, in the
sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that
the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible
hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and
conquered were heathen,