seventy miles long,
extending from Newcastle to beyond Carlisle, for the purpose of keeping
out the Picts and Scots; HADRIAN had strengthened it; SEVERUS, finding it
much in want of repair, had built it afresh of stone.

Above all, it was in the Roman time, and by means of Roman ships, that
the Christian Religion was first brought into Britain, and its people
first taught the great lesson that, to be good in the sight of GOD, they
must love their neighbours as themselves, and do unto others as they
would be done by. The Druids declared that it was very wicked to believe
in any such thing, and cursed all the people who did believe it, very
heartily. But, when the people found that they were none the better for
the blessings of the Druids, and none the worse for the curses of the
Druids, but, that the sun shone and the rain fell without consulting the
Druids at all, they just began to think that the Druids were mere men,
and that it signified very little whether they cursed or blessed. After
which, the pupils of the Druids fell off greatly in numbers, and the
Druids took to other trades.

Thus I have come to the end of the Roman time in England. It is but
little that is known of those five hundred years; but some remains of
them are still found. Often, when labourers are digging up the ground,
to make foundations for houses or churches, they light on rusty money
that once belonged to the Romans. Fragments of plates from which they
ate, of goblets from which they drank, and of pavement on which they
trod, are discovered among the earth that is broken by the plough, or the
dust that is crumbled by the gardener's spade. Wells that the Romans
sunk, still yield water; roads that the Romans made, form part of our
highways. In some old battle-fields, British spear-heads and Roman
armour have been found, mingled together in decay, as they fell in the
thick pressure of the fight. Traces of Roman camps overgrown with grass,
and of mounds that are the burial-places of heaps of Britons, are to be
seen in almost all parts of the country. Across the bleak moors of
Northumberland, the wall of SEVERUS, overrun with moss and weeds, still
stretches, a strong ruin; and the shepherds and their dogs lie sleeping
on it in the summer weather. On Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge yet stands:
a monument of the earlier time when the Roman name was unknown in
Britain, and when the Druids, with their best magic wands, could not have
written it