or, where the elevation of the ground is against marsh and there is no rampart, vanished rampart, rather than vanished forest. The "celts," to one who does not profess to have made a profound study of British antiquities, seem to be neither here nor there in the argument. South-eastern Britons had some civilization even before Cæsar came. They were tillers of the soil and, apparently, had commerce with the Continent, even in metals. They resisted Cæsar by force, and their scythe-chariots (afterwards the model for the Roman travelling carriages) were not without their effect upon the legions. A people who could make these scythe-chariots, who severed the mistletoe with a golden sickle, were hardly likely to use flint knives in daily life. It follows, or at any rate seems to follow, that the "celts," if they are evidence of any period at all, as of course they must be, are evidence of men who lived near Lexden long before Cunobelin. Still, on the whole, the argument that Lexden represents the Camulodunum of the Britons (I wonder what they really called it, for Camulodunum is about as unBritish as it well can be) is fairly strong. It is strong enough at any rate to warrant the belief that here "the British warrior Queen," letting her barbarian troops loose on the panic-stricken and defenceless colonists, avenged her wrongs ruthlessly and in a wild abandon of cruelty. Sluggish Colne and the Roman river really did, we may take it for almost certain, run with the blood of Romans; and this is no figure of speech, as it usually is when battles are so described. Camulodunum was not a battle but a massacre; Boadicea was _furens femina_ with a vengeance, and with good cause. She really had bled from the Roman rods, her daughters had been outraged, her just possessions had been stolen; the Iceni were, clearly, in a wild ecstasy of murderous madness. If ever there was slaughter grim and great in this world, Lexden saw it in the year of grace 61. Another place, some say Messing, not far off and near Kelvedon, saw the tables turned a little later. Then, said the Romans, eighty thousand British fell, and Boadicea anticipated the vengeance of her foes by taking poison before they reached her. Still, if she in any way resembled her sisters of to-day, she had enjoyed at least some measure of satisfaction.