"When a noble act is done--perchance in a scene of great natural beauty: when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and the moon come each and look upon them once in the steep defile of Thermopylæ: when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" Assuredly "yes" to that question from Emerson, and assuredly, too, they pay back every day what they have borrowed, giving to a noble landscape the added charm of its human association with a noble deed. The white cliffs of England are beautiful and impressive as they show like gleaming ramparts defending green fields and fruitful valleys. But they become more beautiful and more impressive as one thinks of them confronting the Romans stepping from Gaul to a wider conquest; or facing William of Normandy as he set out to enforce a weak claim with a strong sword; or set like white defiant teeth at the great ships of the Spanish Armada as they passed up the English Channel with Drake in pursuit, the unwieldy Spanish galleons showing like bulls pursued by gadflies. Let us then look for a moment at England in the making before considering the England of to-day. When the British Isles were cut off from the mainland, England was, without doubt, inhabited by people akin to the Gauls. The people of the French province of Brittany are to-day very clearly cousins of the people of those districts of England, such as Cornwall, which preserve most of the old Briton blood. Separation from the mainland does not seem to have effected very much change in the national type by the time that history came on the scene to make her records. Cæsar found the Britons very like the Gauls. They had not developed into a maritime people. Fisheries they had, for food and for pearls; but they had none of the piratical adventurousness of the Norsemen. That they were naked, woad-painted savages, those Britons of Cæsar's time, has been held long as a popular belief. But that is hardly tenable in the light of the knowledge which recent archæological investigation has given, though, likely enough, they painted for battle, as soldiers of a later time used to wear plumes and glittering uniforms to impress and frighten the enemy. Excavations in more than one district of late have shown that the early Britons possessed a good share of civilisation before ever the Romans came to their land. Thus near Northampton there is a place which used to be a camp of the Britons prior to the Roman occupation. The camp has an area of about four acres, and was defended by a ditch fifteen feet deep, and about thirty feet wide, with a rampart on either side of the fosse.