Caesar says indeed nothing of London, yet it is difficult to believe that this was an unimportant place, even in his day. It was long the principal town of the Cantii, whom the Roman general describes as the most polished of the inhabitants of Britain; and as we know that there was an active commercial intercourse between the eastern coast of England and Gaul, it is at least probable that a station, upon a great river at a safe yet easy distance from the sea, was not unknown to the foreign merchants who traded to our shores[759]. One hundred and sixteen years later it could be described as a city famous in a high degree for the resort of merchants and for traffic[760]: but of these years one hundred had been spent in peace and in the natural development of their resources by the Britons, undisturbed by Roman ambition; and we have therefore ample right to infer that from the very first Cair Lunden had been a place of great commercial importance. The Romans on their return found and kept it so, although they did not establish a colonia there. The first place which received this title with all its corresponding advantages was Camelodunum, probably the British Cair Colun, now Colchester in Essex[761]. ----- Footnote 759: It is clear that Caesar was not greatly harassed in his march towards the ford of the Thames near Chertsey; and if, as is probable, his advance disarmed the Cantii generally, or compelled the more warlike of their body to retire upon the force of Cassivelaunus, concentrated on the left bank of the river, we can understand what would otherwise seem a very dangerous movement,—a march into Surrey, leaving London unoccupied on the right flank. Thus it seems to me that the fact of Caesar’s not noticing the city may be more readily explained by its not lying within the scope of his manœuvres, than by its not existing in his time. And indeed it is probable that just here some portion of his memoirs has been lost: for in the nineteenth chapter of the fifth book, he distinctly says: “Cassivelaunus, _ut supra demonstravimus_, omni deposita spe contentionis,” etc.; but nothing now remains in what we possess, to which these words can possibly be referred. Caesar’s Commentaries were the private literary occupation of the great soldier in peaceful times, and we cannot attribute this contradiction in his finished work to carelessness. Footnote 760: “At Suetonius mira constantia medios inter hostes Londinium perrexit, cognomento quidem coloniae non insigne, sed copia negotiatorum et commeatuum maxime celebre.” Tacit. Ann. xiv. 33. “Not a colonia,” seems to me equivalent to saying, a British city.—Twenty years after the return of the Romans to Britain, _seventy thousand_ citizens and allies perished during Boadicea’s rebellion in London, Verulam and Colchester. (Ibid.) Footnote 761: