grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open,
spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange
air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day. The
navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman's
attention in the calm of a summer's day (he would choose his
weather), when the single row of long sweeps (the galley would be a
light one, not a trireme) could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet
of water like plate-glass, reflecting faithfully the classic form
of his vessel and the contour of the lonely shores close on his
left hand. I assume he followed the land and passed through what
is at present known as Margate Roads, groping his careful way along
the hidden sandbanks, whose every tail and spit has its beacon or
buoy nowadays. He must have been anxious, though no doubt he had
collected beforehand on the shores of the Gauls a store of
information from the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen,
slave-dealers, pirates--all sorts of unofficial men connected with
the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of
channels and sandbanks, of natural features of the land useful for
sea-marks, of villages and tribes and modes of barter and
precautions to take: with the instructive tales about native
chiefs dyed more or less blue, whose character for greediness,
ferocity, or amiability must have been expounded to him with that
capacity for vivid language which seems joined naturally to the
shadiness of moral character and recklessness of disposition. With
that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious thought, watchful
for strange men, strange beasts, strange turns of the tide, he
would make the best of his way up, a military seaman with a short
sword on thigh and a bronze helmet on his head, the pioneer post-
captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the Isle of
Thanet of a ferocious disposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with