as the faces of men, so all similitudes of the face are weak and perishable things, while the fashion of the soul is everlasting, such as may be expressed, not in some foreign substance, or by the help of art, but in our own lives. Whatever we loved, whatever we admired in Agricola, survives, and will survive in the hearts of men, in the succession of the ages, in the fame that waits on noble deeds. Over many, indeed, of those who have gone before, as over the inglorious and ignoble, the waves of oblivion will roll; Agricola, made known to posterity by history and tradition, will live for ever."
To English readers Agricola is naturally one of the most interesting persons in Roman annals, since he was the first to disclose to Cæsar and Europe the extent and value of the youngest of Roman provinces. He has commonly the credit of being the first circumnavigator of our island; but of late years this opinion has been considerably modified. The insular character of Britain had been asserted ever since the time of Cæsar; but Dion Cassius, an historian of the second century of our era, is the first to relate that Agricola's fleet, in the year 84 A.D., sailed completely round it. But it should be borne in mind that Dion flourished more than a century after the supposed circumnavigation took place, and at a time when the form and dimensions of Britain were well known, and its roads and principal harbours were laid down in the Itineraries. Unfortunately the text of Tacitus is corrupt just where we need it to be clear, and we cannot pronounce from his narrative whether he described Agricola's naval officers as having completed or merely forwarded the discovery. He tells us that after Agri-
