The history of Agricola during this period is of course the history of Britain. Accordingly the author prefaces it with an outline of the geographical features, the situation, soil, climate, productions and, so far as known to the Romans, the past history of the island. Tacitus possessed peculiar advantages for being the historian of the early Britons. His father-in-law was the first to subject the whole island to the sway of Rome. He traversed the country from south to north at the head of his armies, explored it with his own eyes, and reported what he saw to our author with his own lips. He saw the Britons too, in their native nobleness, in their primitive love of liberty and virtue; before they had become the slaves of Roman arms, the dupes of Roman arts, or the victims of Roman vices. A few paragraphs in the concise and nervous style of Tacitus, have made us quite acquainted with the Britons, as Agricola found them; and on the whole, we have no reason to be ashamed of the primaeval inhabitants of the land of our ancestry. They knew their rights, they prized them, they fought for them bravely and died for them nobly. More harmony among themselves might have delayed, but could not have prevented the final catastrophe. Rome in the age of Trajan was irresistible; and Britain became a Roman province. This portion of the Agricola of Tacitus, and the Germania of the same author, entitle him to the peculiar affection and lasting gratitude of those, whose veins flow with Briton and Anglo-Saxon blood, as the historian, and the contemporary historian too, of their early fathers. It is a notable providence for us, nay it is a kind providence for mankind, that has thus preserved from the pen of the most sagacious and reflecting of all historians an account, too brief though it be, of the origin and antiquities of the people that of all others now exert the widest dominion whether in the political or the moral world, and that have made those countries which were in his day shrouded in darkness, the radiant points for the moral and spiritual illumination of our race. "The child is father to the man," and if we would at this day investigate the elements of English law, we have it on the authority of Sir William Blackstone, that we must trace them back to their founders in the customs of the Britons and Germans, as recorded by Caesar and Tacitus. With the retirement of Agricola from the command in Britain, the author falls back more into the province of biography. The few occasional strokes, however, in which the pencil of Tacitus has sketched the character of Domitian in the background of the picture of Agricola are the more to be prized, because his history of that reign is lost. In narrating the closing scenes of Agricola's life, Tacitus breathes the very spirit of an affectionate son, without sacrificing the impartiality and gravity of the historian, and combines all a mourner's simplicity and sincerity with all the orator's dignity and eloquence.