d differing from and influencing that which
came from Scandinavia. We must certainly allow that it was art, and
that it contained no Greek or other classical element. His
illustrations explain and give great weight to his theories.

Caesar invaded England forty-five years B.C.[559] The Romans gave us
Christianity and the rudiments of civilization, but their attempts to
Romanize us met with little success. Probably they imported their
luxuries, and removed all they valued at the time of their exodus.
From them we know what they found and what they left in Britain.
Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, the day of her defeat wore a tartan
dress (polymita) and an "embroidered" or "fur" mantle; probably the
fur was inside, and the skins embroidered outside. Dion Cassius,[560]
who describes Boadicea's motley tunic, says that the bulk of the
people wore what was apparently a chequered tartan. Semper says that
the early tribes of Northern Europe, like the North American Indians
of the present time, embroidered their fur wraps. The Emperor
Honorius, in the fourth century, made it illegal for Roman nobles to
wear extravagantly-worked fur robes; perhaps the report of Boadicea's
dress had set the fashion in Rome.

During the first four centuries of our era, all art in Britain must
have come from our Roman masters; and owing to their neglect of the
people they conquered, we benefited little by their civilization.

All that we know of their decorative art in Britain, is that it was,
with few exceptions, chiefly of small bronze statues, somewhat crude
and colonial, as appears from the remains of their architecture,
sculpture, mosaics, and tombs.[561] Of their textiles we have no
relics, and hardly know of any recorded, if we except the works of the
Empress Helena. See p. 316, _ante_. We must remember that, as she was
a British princess, it is likely that she had learnt her art at home,
and therefore that the women of England were already embroiderers as
early as the beginning of the fourth century.[562]

On the departure of the Romans, chaos ensued, till the Britons, who
had called in the Saxons to help them, were by them driven into Wales,
Brittany, and Ireland, which last they Christianized; and mingled the
art of the Germans and Celts with that of the Danes and Norsemen[563];
all which may be traced in the Irish remains to be seen in the
College Museum at Dublin and elsewhere. From the time that England
became Anglo-Saxon, literature,