of the Roman Wall at Leicester.]

[Illustration: Pediment of a Roman temple found at Bath.]

25. =The Roman Province of Britain.=--Very little is known of the
history of the Roman province of Britain, except that it made
considerable progress in civilisation. The Romans were great
road-makers, and though their first object was to enable their
soldiers to march easily from one part of the country to another, they
thereby encouraged commercial intercourse. Forests were to some extent
cleared away by the sides of the new roads, and fresh ground was
thrown open to tillage. Mines were worked and country houses built,
the remains of which are in some places still to be seen, and bear
testimony to the increased well-being of a population which, excepting
in the south-eastern part of the island, had at the arrival of the
Romans been little removed from savagery. Cities sprang up in great
numbers. Some of them were at first garrison towns, like Eboracum,
Deva, and Isca Silurum. Others, like Verulamium, near the present St.
Albans, occupied the sites of the old stockades once used as places of
refuge by the Celts, or, like Lindum, on the top of the hill on which
Lincoln Cathedral now stands, were placed in strongly defensible
positions. Aquae Sulis, the modern Bath, owes its existence to its warm
medicinal springs. The chief port of commerce was Londinium, the
modern London. Attempts which have been made to explain its name by
the Celtic language have failed, and it is therefore possible that an
inhabited post existed there even before the Celts arrived. Its
importance was, however, owing to its position, and that importance
was not of a kind to tell before a settled system of commercial
intercourse sprang up. London was situated on the hill on which St.
Paul's now stands. There first, after the Thames narrowed into a
river, the merchant found close to the stream hard ground on which he
could land his goods. The valley for some distance above and below it
was then filled with a wide marsh or an expanse of water. An old track
raised above the marsh crossed the river by a ford at Lambeth, but, as
London grew in importance, a ferry was established where London Bridge
now stands, and the Romans, in course of time, superseded the ferry by
a bridge. It is, therefore, no wonder that the Roman roads both from
the north and from the south converged upon London. Just as Eboracum
was a fitting centre for military operations directed to th