The Silures were not reduced by the loss of Caractacus, and the great defeat they had suffered.  They resisted every measure of force or artifice that could be employed against them, with the most generous obstinacy:  a resolution in which they were confirmed by some imprudent words of the legate, threatening to extirpate, or, what appeared to them scarcely less dreadful, to transplant their nation.  Their natural bravery thus hardened into despair, and inhabiting a country very difficult of access, they presented an impenetrable barrier to the progress of that commander; insomuch that, wasted with continual cares, and with the mortification to find the end of his affairs so little answerable to the splendor of their beginning, Ostorius died of grief, and left all things in confusion.

The legates who succeeded to his charge did little more for about sixty years than secure the frontiers of the Roman province.  But in the beginning of Nero’s reign the command in Britain was devolved on Suetonius Paulinus, a soldier of merit and experience, who, when he came to view the theatre of his future operations, and had well considered the nature of the country, discerned evidently that the war must of necessity be protracted to a great length, if he should be obliged to penetrate into every fastness to which the enemy retired, and to combat their flying parties one by one.  He therefore resolved to make such a blow at the head as must of course disable all the inferior members.

The island then called Mona, now Anglesey, at that time was the principal residence of the Druids.  Here their councils were held, and their commands from hence were dispersed among all the British nations.  Paulinus proposed, in reducing this their favorite and sacred seat, to destroy, or at least greatly to weaken, the body of the Druids, and thereby to extinguish the great actuating principle of all the Celtic people, and that which was alone capable of communicating order and energy to their operations.

Whilst the Roman troops were passing that strait which divides this island from the continent of Britain, they halted on a sudden,—­not checked by the resistance of the enemy, but suspended by a spectacle of an unusual and altogether surprising nature.  On every side of the British army were seen bands of Druids in their most sacred habits surrounding the troops, lifting their hands to heaven, devoting to death their enemies, and animating their disciples to religious frenzy by the uncouth ceremonies of a savage ritual, and the horrid mysteries of a superstition familiar with blood.  The female Druids also moved about in a troubled order, their hair dishevelled, their garments torn, torches in their hands, and, with an horror increased by the perverted softness of their sex, howled out the same curses and incantations with greater clamor.[15] Astonished at this sight, the Romans for some time neither advanced nor returned the darts of the enemy.  But at length, rousing