wealthy. Samian bowls and rudely coloured plaster, and even makeshift hypocausts, occur in the cottages of outlying hamlets. The material civilization of Roman Britain was definitely and decisively Roman. There was no trace in it of any national hatred for the products of alien industry or for the fashions of hated conquerors. The old idea that the Britons remained apart from the Romans, speaking British, obeying their native chiefs, living under their native laws, like the Zulus and Maories of our own Empire, must be discarded. The Celtic law may have been recognised, like other systems of native law in other provinces. The great native families may have. kept high social and local position. But the Celtic elements which survived, survived in harmony with, and not in contrast to, the Roman civilization. At the end of the Roman period the Briton could call himself Romanus.
   The Romanization, then, was complete, at least in the lowlands. But it must be further qualified as a Romanisation on a low scale. The more elaborate features of the Italian civilization, whether intellectual or administrative or material, were rare in Britain. The finest products of continental arts and crafts, in glass and pottery and gold-work, in marble and statuary, were seldom imported into the island. The Romano-British mosaics, though numerous enough, are almost always conventional and undistinguished, and the admiration which they have sometimes excited is ill-deserved. Romano-British literature was apparently scanty, and the little that survives of it, such as the fragments of Pelagius, or the two brief relics of St. Patrick, owe their interest to quite other reasons than literary excellence. Of organized municipal or commercial life the remains, though normal in character, are significantly few. The civilization of Roman Britain comprised few elements of wealth or splendour.
   The two chief local forms of this civilization were the town and the country-house. The towns of Roman Britain were comparatively numerous,, but, as we might expect, they were for the most part small. The highest form of town life known to the Roman was certainly uncommon in Britain. though commoner there than in northern Gaul: the colonia and municipia,. the privileged municipalities possessing Roman franchise and Roman charters, were represented, so far as we know, by only five examples, the colonia of Colchester, Lincoln, York, and Gloucester, and the municipium of Verulam, and none of these could vie with the greater municipalities of other provinces. They do not, however, stand alone. London, though it seems never to have obtained a proper municipal charter, is proved by the witness of ancient writers, by its own remains, and by its later title Augusta, to have been large and important. It was, indeed, the seat of the financial authorities of the province, the commercial capital, and the centre of the road system of southern Britain. Bath, perhaps only a spa, was an important spa, famed for its hot springs, its luxurious bathing establishment, and the splendid temple of its goddess, Sul Minerva, and attracted visitors even from Gaul. Besides these more or less definitely Roman creations, there were many places of varying size which were characterized by town-life and which we may best describe as country-towns. Many of them appear to have grown out of Celtic tribal centres of pre-Roman days, like similar cantonal capitals in northern Gaul. Of such towns we can detect by reasonable conjecture ten or fifteen examples, of which the best known are Calleva (Silchester), capital of the Atrebates,