What
have we to do with thee, thou daughter of yesterday? Stand aside
while thine elder sister--ay, old enough to be thy mother--takes her
place of honour. She has waited long for her historian; he has come
at last, and he was worth waiting for.
In times before the Roman legionaries planted their firm feet in
Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It
contained about sixty acres; it was surmounted by one of those mighty
earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer
brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organized labour. The
Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the place.
Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and the
conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining some
portion of the old one. In their language it was known as
_Caniboritum_. The primeval fortress stood on the left bank of
the river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam; and
for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit to
span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via Devana
pass sheer through the river-as some Dutch or German Irrationalist
has pretended that the children of Israel did when they found the
Jordan barring their progress--that is, those Roman creatures
constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish stream, over
which less audacious engineers would have thrown an arch.
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