resist his supersession, but returned to Rome, lived there as a private but harassed citizen, declining the governorship of Syria (which was offered to him with a hint that it would be dangerous to accept it), and died at Rome in the fifty-fourth year of his age on August 23, A.D. 93. The suggestions of foul play and of poison stealthily administered by order of Domitian are mentioned, but hardly endorsed, even by the suspicious pen of his son-in-law. That son-in-law was absent from Rome at the time of his death, but describes the deathbed scene from the reports of the bystanders; and his farewell to the departed spirit of the beloved one, the celebrated peroration of the Life of Agricola, is one of the most beautiful things in Roman literature. CHAPTER V. THE ROMAN OCCUPATION. With the departure of Agricola the literary history of Roman Britain comes to an end. For three centuries longer the legions were to remain in our island, and the buildings which they reared, the altars which they inscribed, the roads which they constructed, tell us something of the life which they led during that long space of time, as long as the whole period that has elapsed from Elizabeth’s days to ours. Archæology has much to tell us concerning it, but history is almost altogether silent. A few sections of Dion Cassius, some confused notices in the _Historia Augusta_, a page or two of Ammianus Marcellinus, are practically all that is left to us of the written history of our country from Agricola to Stilicho. We need not here discuss the causes of a silence so tantalising and so irremediable; how far it may have sprung from Roman contempt of a distant and mist-enveloped island, how far from a decay of courage and hopefulness in the Romans themselves, symptoms of the impending ruin of their empire; it is enough that the pages are for us left blank and can now never be filled.