The Reign of Tiberius | Page 8

until Agricola subdued it for Domitian. "The Life of Agricola" is of general interest, because it preserves the memory of a good and noble Roman: to us, it is of special interest, because it records the state of Britain when it was a dependency of the Caesars; "adjectis Britannis imperio." Our present fashions in history will not allow us to think, that we have much in common with those natives, whom Tacitus describes: but fashions change, in history as in other things; and in a wiser time we may come to know, and be proud to acknowledge, that we have derived a part of our origin, and perhaps our fairest accomplishments, from the Celtic Britons. The narrative of Tacitus requires no explanation; and I will only bring to the memory of my readers, Cowper's good poem on Boadicea. We have been dwelling upon the glories of the Roman Empire: it may be pardonable in us, and it is not unpleasing, to turn for a moment, I will not say to "the too vast orb" of our fate, but rather to that Empire which is more extensive than the Roman; and destined to be, I hope, more enduring, more united, and more prosperous. Horace will hardly speak of the Britons, as humane beings, and he was right; in his time, they were not a portion of the Roman World, they had no part in the benefits of the Roman government: he talks of them, as beyond the confines of civility, "in ultimos orbis Britannos;" as cut off by "the estranging sea," and there jubilant in their native practices, "Visum Britannos hospitibus feros." But Cowper says, no less truly, of a despised and rebel Queen;
_Regions Caesar never knew, Thy posterity shall sway; Where his Eagles never flew, None invincible as they._
The last battles of Agricola were fought in Scotland; and, in the pages of Tacitus, he achieved a splendid victory among the Grampian hills. Gibbon remarks, however, "The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians." The Scotch themselves are never tired of asserting, and of celebrating, their "independence"; Scotland imposed a limit to the victories of the Roman People, Scaliger says in his compliments to Buchanan:
_Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia lines._
But it may be questioned, whether it were an unmixed blessing, to be excluded from the Empire; and to offer a sullen resistance to its inestimable gifts of humane life, of manners, and of civility.
To these things, the Germans also have manifested a strong dislike; and they are more censurable than the Scotch, because all their knowledge of the Romans was not derived from the intercourse of war. "The Germany" of Tacitus is a document, that has been much discussed; and these discussions may be numbered among the most flagrant examples of literary intemperance: but this will not surprise us, when we allow for the structure of mind, the language, and the usual productions of those, to whom the treatise is naturally of the greatest importance. In the description of the Germans, Tacitus goes out of his way to laugh at the "licentia vetustatis," "the debauches of pedants and antiquarians;" as though he suspected the fortunes of his volume, and the future distinctions of the Teutonic genius. For sane readers, it will be enough to remark, that the Germany of Tacitus was limited, upon the west, by the natural and proper boundary of the Rhine; that it embraced a portion of the Low Countries; and that, although he says it was confined within the Danube, yet the separation is not clear between the true Germans and those obscurer tribes, whose descendants furnish a long enumeration of titles to the present melancholy sovereign of the House of Austria. Gibbon remarks, with his usual sense, "In their primitive state of simplicity and independence, the Germans were surveyed by the discerning eye, and delineated by the masterly pencil of Tacitus, the first historian who supplied the science of philosophy to the study of facts. The expressive conciseness of his descriptions has deserved to exercise the diligence of innumerable antiquarians, and to excite the genius and penetration of the philosophic historians of our own time." Upon a few sentences out of the "Germania"; which relate to the kings, to the holding of land, to the public assemblies, and to the army; an imposing