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36 towered the great temple of Claudius, a perpetual insult to the deities of the land. The city, betrayed by the Trinobantes, was assailed by the Iceni. The garrison was feeble: the fortifications were hastily run up at the last moment: the troops which might have defended it were in remote quarters; and on the second day of the siege the stronghold was stormed, and all who had sought refuge in it, armed or unarmed, were slaughtered.

This was the last signal calamity that befell the Romans in Britain, and it was speedily avenged. Suetonius, in spite of his great services, was recalled. He appears to have been better suited for the rough work of war than for the delicate office of soothing the conquered, and reconciling them to their new masters. Under his successor, Petronius Turpilianus, victors and vanquished enjoyed without abusing them two years of peace, and Roman civilisation hogan to exercise its influence on Britain.

Under the successors of Agricola, the southern Britons generally acquiesced in the dominion of Rome, and the northern were awed by her prowess, or won by her arts. Commerce tended to efface the ravages of war. The products of the island, consisting chiefly of raw materials, found a ready market in the cities of Gaul; the youth of Britain were drafted into the legions and dispersed over the wide circumference of the empire in the camps of Egypt, Africa, and Syria, while at the same time natives of other lineage, and speaking strange languages, were imported into an island which a century earlier had been described as a new and scarcely habitable world.

"A hope is expressed," says Gibbon, "by Pompo-