With her long yellow hair unbound, and falling in clusters far below the golden chain which encircled her waist, her dark eyes flashing vengeance as she glanced angrily aside to where the Roman legions were drawn up in the distance, (an impenetrable mass, looking in their coats of mail like a wall of steel, bristling with swords and spears,) and with the curved crimson of her cruel lip haughtily upturned, Boadicea rose tall and queen-like from the war-chariot in which her weeping daughters were seated, and turning to the assembled tribes who hemmed her round with a forest of tall spears, she raised her hand to command silence; and when the busy murmur of subdued applause which acknowledged her bravery had died away, she bade them remember the wrongs they had to revenge, the weight of oppression which had so long bowed their necks to the dust; the sword, and fire, and famine, which had desolated their fair land; their sons and daughters carried off and doomed to all the miseries of slavery; their priests ruthlessly butchered at the foot of the altar; their ancient groves hewn to the ground by sacrilegious hands, and consumed by fire; she pointed to her daughters whom the invaders had violated, and raising her white and rounded arm, showed the marks which the scourge of the ruffianly Catus had left behind; then brandishing her spear aloft, she shook the loosened reins over her restive steeds, and was soon lost in the thickest of the battle. But the lapse of a century, and the many battles in which they had fought, had not yet enabled the Britons to stand firm before the shock of the Roman legions. They were defeated with tremendous slaughter; and the queen, who had so nobly revenged her country's wrongs, only escaped the carnage to perish by her own hand. Even down the dim vista of time we can yet perceive her; the flower of her army lying around dead; the remnant routed and pursued by the merciless Romans, while she, heartbroken, hopeless, and alone, sacrifices her own life; and though but a heathen, does a deed which in that barbarous age would have ennobled her had she been born in the country of her civilized invaders, who would proudly have erected a statue to her memory in that city whose haughty emperors proclaimed themselves the conquerors of the world. Little did the vanquishers dream a woman would spring up and emulate the deeds of their most renowned warriors, and that the fair barbarian would in after ages leave behind her a more than Roman name.