thought prudent. He laid his plan of battle so as to aim at the great boast of a Roman general-a victory without the loss of Roman blood. In the centre and front were eight thousand auxiliaries, including some Romanised Britons from the south. The legions were drawn up in rear of the camp as a reserve. The Caledonians are described as riding furiously about with chariots in the space between the two camps. Their weapons were arrows, small shields, and large pointless swords. While the fight was one of mere missiles, the Caledonians held their own; but Agricola directed three Batavian and two Tungrian cohorts to charge them with the gladius. For this sort of contest the weapons of the barbarians, and their method of fighting, were unsuited. They gave way, while other cohorts pressed on. The Caledonian chariots, it would appear, routed the Roman cavalry; but when they dashed at the infantry, the vehicles got embarrassed in the broken ground, and a scene of ruin and confusion followed, in which they were more mischievous to the charioteers themselves than to the Romans. The Roman general, seeing some of the enemy descend from the hill for the purpose of outflanking him, successfully competed with them in that tactic, and attacked them in the rear. It was, in short, a complete victory; and its historian in the usual manner describes the field covered with blood and broken armourwith the dead and the dying. There was a great slaughter in the retreat. Ten thousand is the number of slain set down to the barbarian side; three hundred and forty to the Roman. Next morning all was solitude-no enemy was to be seen; and Caledonia might be counted as annexed to the empire. There was, at

all events, no more to be done by Agricola, for after the next winter he had to return to Rome to face the jealous Domitian.

Such is the substance of the narrative given by Tacitus. It is the only distinct account of the doings of the Romans in Scotland, though they long struggled for its annexation, and were perhaps for three hundred years in occupation of more or less of the soil. Commander after commander brought over troops and fought battles north of the Tweed, but none of them had a Tacitus for a son-in-law. The life of Agricola, eulogised by Gibbon as "the most early of those historical compositions which will delight and instruct the most distant posterity," is clear and sparkling to perfection, and yet it is far from satisfactory for the purposes of true history. One feels how much better it would have been told to that end by a homely narrator like Herodotus, inquisitive about small matters, and telling all he knew. Tacitus did not write to instruct the world about the Caledonians, but to create a sensation at home, where his parent's fame and merits were overshadowed by the gloomy jealousy of Domitian. He had to paint up to such a purpose, and make his hero victorious in the stricken field in the face of a large army of disciplined troops. To bring the conventional character of the narrative to preposterous completeness, the leaders must each make a speech. It was the fashion of historical literature: all Livy's generals made speeches; and the leader of the barbarians must give his contribution as well as the cultivated Roman. How much more valuable would it have been to us had Tacitus deigned to tell us something about the tongue in which the leader of the barbarians spoke, or even

his name, and the name of the place where he fought, as the natives uttered it!

Yet, for the great interests of its day, the speech of Galgacus was far removed from a mere feat of idle pedantry. It was a noble rebuke on the empire and the Roman people, who, false to the high destiny assigned to them by Virgil, of protecting the oppressed and striking down the oppressors, had become the common scourge of all mankind. The profligate ambition, the perfidy, the absorbing pride, the egotism, and the cruelty of the dominant people-how could all be so aptly set forth as in the words of a barbarian chief, ruling over the free people who were to be the next victims? Accordingly, Galgacus speaks out with heart and will and power. So the noble savage tells his people to think well what the nature of the enemy before them is. They have not to deal with a nation like themselves, who may be victors to-day and defeated to-morrow, but with the conquering Empire who have doomed all the world to slavery. If they would forecast their fate under the empire, let them look at the enslaved nations of the south. Unconquered as yet, they are the last refuge of freedom, which will be extinguished by their subjugation. What will be the fate of them and their sons? Abject slavery in distant lands- slavery in the haughty Roman house, where the awkwardness and ruggedness of the new-caught barbarian make mirth for the older slaves, whose happier lot it is to have been reared in servitude. For their wives and daughters there is a lot more terrible still. The produce of their frugal industry will be reft, to add to the swoln stores of the rich oppressor. What a noble destiny not only to defy such a fate, but to be

the first to stem the tide of universal conquest-to be the avengers of past oppression, the liberators from present slavery! And what had such an enemy, in all the splendour of their martial array, to match a band of freemen struggling for all that freemen love? They were a gathering of mercenaries and serfs from all the ends of the world, held together by greed and tyranny, and ready to scatter before the first disaster. Down upon them then, and let each man fight as if the fate of his country and the liberties of the world depended on his single arm.

Such were the leading points of the barbarian chief's oration. They were so richly adorned with trope, climax, and antithesis, as to furnish many of those sentences which for their aptness and brevity are employed to give point to the aim of composition in the modern languages.1 In later times, when the terrible retribution it received has given emphasis to the cruel injustice of Roman domination, no one has given such expression to its character as he who threw his rebuke right in the face of his offending fellow-countrymen. Even those noble lines in which Byron makes the dying gladiator ruminate over the coming vengeance for his fate, lag far behind the fiery eloquence and

1 For instance, in the following passage more than one current quotation will be recognised :-"Nos, terrarum ac libertatis extremos, recessus ipse ac sinus famæ in hunc diem defendit: nunc terminus Britanniæ patet, atque omne ignotum pro magnifico est. Sed nulla jam ultrâ gens, nihil nisi fluctus et saxa, et infestiores Romani, quorum superbiam frustra per obsequium et modestiam effugeris. Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terræ, et mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari: si pauper, ambitiosi: quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari affectu concupiscunt auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus, imperium; atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."

concentrated invective with which the great historian endowed his Caledonian chief.1

If we take the narrative of Tacitus as sufficient evidence that Agricola fought a decisive battle in Scotland, no one has yet succeeded in showing where it was fought. General Roy, a critic whose authority should be highest, as he brought the experience of an engineer officer to aid his knowledge as an archæological scholar, has fixed it at Ardoch in Perthshire, a short way northward of the border of Stirlingshire. At all events, the Romans have there left ample traces of warlike operations. From these and other remains General Roy has tracked through Scotland as far as the borders of Aberdeenshire the progress of Roman troops, sufficient to make an army of 30,000 men, of whom he supposes that 26,000 might have been engaged in the great battle. But this opinion has been vehemently disputed by persons who, with inferior qualifications for the task, have with far more dogmatism found other sites for the Mons Grampius. The question, in fact, occasioned a contest as memorable in literature as the battle itself in history. It is remarkable in the absoluteness with which each champion maintains that he has removed every particle of doubt that can affect the spot favoured by himself. In this way the reader of this special literature finds the field of battle shifting like a chessman over the several

2

1 Among the fabulous kings whose lives and actions are given by Buchanan and the other early historians, Galgacus makes his appearance as Corbredus, surnamed Galdus, the twenty-first king of Scotland.

The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, and particularly their ancient System of Castrametation, illustrated from Vestiges of the Camps of Agricola existing there-hence his march from South into North Britain is in some degree traced.'