thievish as the Bushman, no ethnologist has yet proved. The
very ashes of the founder of London have long since turned to earth,
air, and water.

No doubt the few huts that formed early London were fought for over and
over again, as wolves wrangle round a carcass. On Cornhill there
probably dwelt petty kings who warred with the kings of Ludgate; and in
Southwark there lurked or burrowed other chiefs who, perhaps by intrigue
or force, struggled for centuries to get a foothold in Thames Street.
But of such infusoria History (glorying only in offenders, criminals,
and robbers on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone we
know, that the early rulers of London before the Christian era passed
away like the wild beasts they fought and slew, and their very names
have perished. One line of an old blind Greek poet might have
immortalised them among the motley nations that crowded into Troy or
swarmed under its walls; but, alas for them, that line was never
written! No, Founder of London! thy name was written on fluid ooze of
the marsh, and the first tide that washed over it from the Nore
obliterated it for ever. Yet, perhaps even now thou sleepest as quietly
fathoms deep in soft mud, in some still nook of Barking Creek, as if all
the world was ringing with thy glory.

But descending quick to the lower but safer and firmer ground of fact,
let us cautiously drive our first pile into the shaky morass of early
London history.

A learned modern antiquary, Thomas Lewin, Esq., has proved, as nearly as
such things can be proved, that Julius Caesar and 8,000 men, who had
sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five
o'clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of our
Saviour. Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the
brave standard-bearer of Caesar's Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt
galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of
the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London
was already existing as a British town of some importance, and known to
the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians. Strabo, a Greek
geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British
merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn,
cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory,
amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants the
desirability of such a depot as Londo