requires no explanation; and I will only bring to the memory of my
readers, Cowper's good poem on Boadicea. We have been dwelling upon the
glories of the Roman Empire: it may be pardonable in us, and it is not
unpleasing, to turn for a moment, I will not say to "the too vast orb" of
our fate, but rather to that Empire which is more extensive than the
Roman; and destined to be, I hope, more enduring, more united, and more
prosperous. Horace will hardly speak of the Britons, as humane beings, and
he was right; in his time, they were not a portion of the Roman World,
they had no part in the benefits of the Roman government: he talks of
them, as beyond the confines of civility, "in ultimos orbis Britannos;" as
cut off by "the estranging sea," and there jubilant in their native
practices, "Visum Britannos hospitibus feros." But Cowper says, no less
truly, of a despised and rebel Queen;

_Regions Caesar never knew,
Thy posterity shall sway;
Where his Eagles never flew,
None invincible as they._

The last battles of Agricola were fought in Scotland; and, in the pages of
Tacitus, he achieved a splendid victory among the Grampian hills. Gibbon
remarks, however, "The native Caledonians preserved in the northern
extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not
less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were
frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued.
The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned
with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes
concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the
deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians." The Scotch
themselves are never tired of asserting, and of celebrating, their