Now there is no doubt that places become manifold more interesting if one can fill the scene, so to speak, with action and actors of long ago. Westminster Hall would be majestic if it had no associations, but few men enter it for the first time without recalling the trial of Charles the First. A well-known tract near Brussels would attract no pilgrims if the freedom of Europe had not been won on its fields. The case is the same with Messing. If there be cause for saluting it as the place where Briton and Roman met in a conflict to the death every fold in the ground stirs the imagination. But when an antiquary talks of two large woods as seeming to form a narrow gorge, and a clerical historian writes of a "valley between undulating hills," of a wood in the rear, of a plain in front over which the natives "spread far and wide," and locates the wagons in the rear, only one course is open to me. It is to forget the six and twenty years which have passed since last I faced the "small but well-armed tribe" of the examiners, during which there has been neither occasion nor desire to read Latin prose works, to ignore the terrors of the historic present and of what I believe used to be called _oratio obliqua_, and to refer to Tacitus, upon whom both these clerical gentlemen relied for information. One sentence disposes of the question of position. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had ten thousand armed men when he made up his mind to give battle, "and he picks a place with narrow jaws and closed in by a wood at the rear, well assured that there was no part of the enemy save in the front, and that the plain was open, without fear of ambushes." There is nothing to suggest that the sides of the defile were wooded, as Mr. Jenkins thought they might have been, or that there was any wood at all except in the rear. Indeed, the probability is the other way. Still less is there any word to explain why Dean Merivale invented "a valley between undulating hills." Indeed, the description of the defile by the word _fauces_ (which has been translated literally) conveys a sharper and more rugged idea than our word "valley," which, of course, comes directly from _vallis_ and carries the same meaning. In fact, the "gorge" of Mr. Jenkins is the better translation, and undulating hills would have given Boadicea a chance of taking Suetonius in flank. The wagons apparently were drawn up in a crescent behind the British so that their occupants might see the fight.