desperately attacked his, on the field where it was strongly
posted. Before the first charge of the Britons was made, BOADICEA,
in a war-chariot, with her fair hair streaming in the wind, and her
injured daughters lying at her feet, drove among the troops, and
cried to them for vengeance on their oppressors, the licentious
Romans. The Britons fought to the last; but they were vanquished
with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison.

Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When SUETONIUS
left the country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the Island
of Anglesey. AGRICOLA came, fifteen or twenty years afterwards,
and 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. HADRIAN came, thirty years afterwards, and
still they resisted him. 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. They were the Saxons, a fierce, sea-faring
people from the countries to the North of the Rhine, the great