Roman supremacy and power would come again and again.

For this charming young girl--said, later, to have been the most
beautiful woman of her time in England--though reared to Roman
ways and Roman speech, had too well furnished a mind not to think
for herself. "She spake," so says the record, "many tongues and
was replete with piety." The only child of King Coel, her doting
old father had given her the finest education that Rome could
offer. She was, even before she grew to womanhood, so we are
told, a fine musician, a marvellous worker in tapestry, in
hammered brass and pottery, and was altogether as wise and
wonderful a young woman as even these later centuries can show.

But, for all this grand education, she loved to hear the legends
and stories of her people that in various ways would come to her
ears, either as the simple tales of her British nurse, or in the
wild songs of the wandering bards, or singers.

As she listened to these she thought less of those crude and
barbaric ways of her ancestors that Rome had so vastly bettered
than of their national independence and freedom from the galling
yoke of Rome, and, as was natural, she cherished the memory of
Boadicea, the warrior queen, and made a hero of the fiery young
Caractacus.

It is always so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt
to find greater glories in the misty past, or grander
possibilities in a still more misty future than in the too
practical and prosaic present in which both duty and destiny lie.
And so Helena the princess, Leaning against the soft cushions of