retook it once more, and devoted seven years
to subduing the country, especially that part
of it which is now called SCOTLAND; but, its
people, the Caledonians, resisted him at every
inch of ground. They fought the bloodiest
battles with him; they killed their very wives
and children, to prevent his making prisoners
of them; they fell, fighting, in such great
numbers that certain hills in Scotland are yet
supposed to be vast heaps of stones piled up
above their graves. The Emperor HADRIAN
came, thirty years afterwards, and still they
resisted him. The Emperor SEVERUS came,
nearly a hundred years afterwards, and they
worried his great army like dogs, and rejoiced
to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and
swamps. CARACALLA, the son and successor
of SEVERUS, did the most to conquer them, for
a time; but not by force of arms. He knew
how little that would do. He yielded up a
quantity of land to the Caledonians, and gave
the Britons the same privileges as the Romans
possessed. There was peace, after this, for
seventy years.

Then, new enemies arose—THE SAXONS, a
fierce, seafaring people from the countries to
the North of the Rhine, the great river of
Germany, on the banks of which the best
grapes grow to make the German wine. They
began to come, in pirate ships, to the sea coasts
of Gaul and Britain, and to plunder them.
They were repulsed by CARAUSIUS, a native
either of Belgium or of Britain, who was
appointed by the Romans to the command, and
under whom the Britons first began to fight
upon the sea. But, after his time, they
renewed their ravages. A few years more, and
the Scots (which was then the name for the
people of Ireland) and the Picts, a northern
people, began to make frequent plundering
incursions into the South of Britain. All
these attacks were repeated, at intervals,
during two hundred years, and through a long
succession of Roman Emperors and chiefs;
during all which length of time, the Britons
rose against the Romans, over and over again.
At last, in the days of the Roman Emperor,
HONORIUS, when the Roman power all over
the world was fast declining, and when Rome
wanted all her soldiers at home, the Romans
abandoned all hope of conquering Britain, and
went away. And still, at last, as at first, the
Britons rose against them, in their old brave
manner; for, a very little while before, they
had turned away the Roman magistrates, and
declared themselves an independent people.

Five hundred years had passed, since Julius
Csesar's first invasion of the Island, when the
Romans departed from it for ever. In the
course of that time, although they had been
the cause of terrible fighting and bloodshed,
they had done much to improve the condition
of the Britons. They had made great military
roads; they had built forts; they had taught
them how to dress and arm themselves much
better than they had ever known how to do
before; they had refined the whole British
way of living. AGRICOLA had built a great
wall of earth, more than seventy miles long,
extending from Newcastle to beyond Carlisle,
for the purpose of keeping out the Picts and
Scots; HADRIAN had strengthened it;
SEVERUS, finding it much in want of repair, had
built it afresh of stone. Above all, it was in
the Roman time, and by means of Roman
ships, that the Christian Religion was first
brought into Britain, and its people first
taught the great lesson that, to be good in the
sight of GOD, they must love their neighbours
as themselves, and do unto others as they
would be done by. The Druids declared it
was very wicked to believe any such thing,
and cursed all the people who did believe it,
very heartily. But, when the people found
that they were none the better for the
blessings of the Druids, and none the worse
for the curses of the Druids, but, that the sun
shone and the rain fell without consulting the
Druids at all, they just began to think that
the Druids were mere men, and that it
signified very little whether they cursed or
blessed. After which, the pupils of the
Druids fell off greatly in numbers, and the
Druids took to other trades.

Thus, I have come to the end of the Roman
time in England. It is but little that is
known of those five hundred years; but, some
remains of them are still found. Often, when
laborers are digging up the ground, to make
foundations for houses, or churches, they light
on rusty money that once belonged to the
Romans. Fragments of plates from which
they ate, of goblets from which they drank,
and of pavement on which they trod, are
discovered among the earth that is broken by
the plough, or the dust that is crumbled by
the gardener's spade. Wells that the Romans
sunk, still yield water; roads that the Romans
made, form part of our highways. In some
old battle-fields, British spear-heads and
Roman armour have been found, mingled
together in decay, as they fell in the thick
pressure of the fight. Traces of Roman camps
overgrown with grass, and of mounds that are
the burial-places of heaps of Britons, are to
be seen in almost all parts of the country.
Across the bleak moors of Northumberland,
the wall of SEVERUS, over-run with moss and
weeds, still stretches, a strong ruin; and the
shepherds and their dogs lie sleeping on it in
the summer weather. On Salisbury Plain,
Stonehenge yet stands, a monument of the
earlier time when the Roman name was
unknown in Britain, and when the Druids, with
their best magic wands, could not have written
it, in the sands of the wild sea-shore.

ASPIRE!

ASPIRE! whatever fate befall,
Be it praise or blame—
Aspire! even when deprived of all—
It is thy nature's aim.
The seed beneath the frozen earth,
When winter checks the fresh green birth,