carried on any other kind of commerce, except it might be doing a
little business in dogs, and slaves whom they captured from
neighbouring barbarians,--their imports being polished bits of
bone, toys and horse-collars. Progressing, rapidly under the
Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and in the time of the
Plantagenets, they were in the fifteenth century a great and
wealthy people, illustrious for their commercial transactions,
dealing in every species of commodity, visited by merchants from
every part of Europe, and envied by the most flourishing
communities, such as the trading oligarchies of Italy. Any one
living at that time,--especially in Italy (where many
circumstances induce me to believe that the author or forger of
the "Annals of Tacitus" lived),--and hearing a great deal of the
wealth, greatness and immense antiquity of London, might easily
fall into this mistake, grievous in its enormity as it is. But any
one living about the time of Nero, as Tacitus did, could never
have described London in this flourishing state of commercial
greatness and prosperity. The chances are he never would have
heard of London; for that would be supposing in a Roman at the
close of the first or the commencement of the second century of
our aera a geographical knowledge more minute than that of the
President of the Royal Geographical Society, unless at the
haphazard mention of any particular village in the newly annexed
Fiji Islands, Sir Henry Rawlinson could enter into a correct
account of its chief characteristic. But if we are to go to the
extreme length of supposing that Tacitus had heard of London, he
would know that it was a place of no repute, utterly insignificant,
far inferior in importance to two now almost forgotten places in
Essex and Hertfordshire,--Maldon and St. Alban's,--called then
respectively Camelodunum and Verulamium,--the former being a