CESAR'S INVASION 219 



newspapers something of an effort in retrogression — 

 and so indeed, it is — but when you once succeed in 

 getting there, the history and details of that time 

 are a great deal more interesting than perhaps the 

 reader of special editions, hot and hot, would imagine. 

 We can succeed in picturing the detailed events of 

 that remote time, because Caesar, w^ho was as mighty 

 with the pen as with the sword, has left full and 

 singularly lucid accounts of his wars here and on the 

 Continent — lucid, that is to say, when one penetrates 

 the veil of Latin behind which his exploits and the 

 doings of his legionaries are hid ; but darkly understood 

 by the stumbling schoolboy, to whom the Bello Gallico 

 is as full of linguistic ambushes as the Kentish valleys 

 were of lurking Britons in Caesar's time. 



It was in the year 55 B.C. that Ca?sar, having 

 overrun, if not having entirely conquered, Gaul, came 

 to its northern coast and gazed eagerly across that 

 unknown sea, beyond which had come strange warriors, 

 extraordinarily strong and equally fearless, to aid 

 those troublesome Gaulish fightirg-men who had 

 already given him four years of campaigning, and were 

 still to prove themselves unsubdued. He had already 

 felt the prowess of these " Britons," as they were called, 

 and fighting having slackened somewhat, he conceived 

 the idea of voyaging across the Channel in quest of 

 glory and adventure in the dim and semi-fabled land of 

 these mysterious strangers. " Caesar," he says, speaking 

 of himself always in the third person, " determined to 

 proceed into Britain because he understood that in 

 almost all the Gallic wars succour had been supplied 

 thence to our enemies." So much for his written 

 reasons, but other things must have weighed with him. 

 The lust of conquest would alone have impelled him 

 forward beyond this very outer edge of the known 

 world, even had he not desired to crush these allies 

 of Gaul ; but when wild tales reached him of the 

 richness of the land that lay beyond this strait, whose 

 cliffs he could dimly see, the impulse to invade it was 



