ntinued to
Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it
controlled; by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low
ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of
communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and
Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depot
and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.

Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a
mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who,
writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the
landing of Caesar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp
in outline, that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than
written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though not, indeed,
dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the
number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic. In the year 62
London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not
Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban's). When the
Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the
Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back
still "bleeding from the Roman rods," she slew in London and Verulamium
alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome; impaling many beautiful and
well-born women, amid revelling sacrifices, in the grove of Andate, the
British Goddess of Victory. It is supposed that after this reckless
slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of
wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is, that
when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the
lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured
dice laying scattered like flower leaves, and above that of a thick
layer of wood ashes, as of the _debris_ of charred wooden buildings.
This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a
butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King's Cross
(otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage
and despair, took poison and perished.

London probably soon sprang, phoenix-like, from the fire, though history
leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years. In the early part of
the second century Ptolemy, the geographer, speaks of it as a city of
the Kentish people; but Mr. Craik very ingeniou