which was of Trajan, and another of Allectus. In Bread Street, besides some richly figured Samian vases, and some of the circular earthen pans which have commonly been held to be mortaria, or triturating instruments, but which Mr. Smith conceives to have more probably been used for cooking in, were obtained some specimens of what are called " paintings from the walls of Roman dwellings,' but which seem to have been in fact merely coloured designs with which the walls were embellished, in something of the same style with the patterns on our modern paper-hangings. Even as such, however, they were objects of the highest curiosity. Unfortunately, they were greatly injured. "They exhibit," says Mr. Smith, "great freshness of colours when first brought to the air, and washed free from dirt, but soon vary and fade, so as in a short time to afford but a faint idea of their original beauty. The prevalent colours on the specimens I obtained were yellow, white, red, and green: some have a border of white circles, and some alternate borders of white and green on a red ground, while others exhibited traces of flowers or fanciful designs." Such designs, however, can hardly be considered as belonging to the same class with the varied and spirited delineations exhibited by the frescos in many of the houses of Pompeii-which are really pictures in the highest and truest sense.

Some of the most interesting of the Roman antiquities recently found have been obtained from the bed of the Thames; for water, in its effectual exclusion of the great corroder, the common atmospheric air, is in some respects a still better preserver than a thick covering of earth, which, if it protects the articles deposited in it from some dangers and injurious influences, acts upon many of them with peculiar powers of its own almost as virulent and destructive. There is in the British Museum a silver Harpocrates, about two inches and a half in height, which was found in the bed of the river in 1825, and presented to the Museum by Messrs. Rundle and Bridge, of Ludgate Hill. It is supposed to have been worn as an amulet, or by a priest as his ensign of office, being suspended by a chain of gold, very delicately wrought, which crosses the image in front, and passes through a strong rivet at the back. Many imperial coins were also found, and so deposited, it has been stated, across the bed of the river, as to afford a strong confirmation to the opinion that there must have been a passage over the Thames by a bridge in the time of the Romans. And since the completion of the new bridge, a number of bronzes were found in January 1837 in its neighbourhood by some men employed in ballast-heaving, of which Mr. Smith has given an interesting account in another paper in the Archæologia. One of them represents a priest of Cybele; another the God Mercury; the third appears to be a fragment of a Jupiter; the fourth, which is also mutilated, is an Apollo, of remarkable beauty; the fifth, representing Atys, is of coarser workmanship than the others—it was found at Barnes among gravel taken from the spot where the others had been found. Mr. Smith conceives that the Mercury, the Apollo, and the Atys, were probably the penates of some opulent Roman family residing in London-and that they were not lost, but thrown into the Thames, after they had been intentionally mutilated—the injuries they have received being apparently such as could hardly have been the effect of accident. Such iconoclastic procedures were common with the early converts to

* Archæologia, vol. xxviii. pp. 38-46.

Christianity; and to that cause we are no doubt to attribute the destruction or mutilation of many ancient sculptures and other productions of the arts which had been dedicated to the service of Paganism. Of the few relics of the old religion, besides cineraries, lachrymatories, and some sacrificing vessels, that recent subterranean investigation has brought to light in London, one of the most remarkable is a stone altar, exhibiting a figure of Apollo, which was found some years ago in Foster Lane in digging the foundations for the new Goldsmiths' Hall. *

We have already had occasion to notice some of the appearances detected in digging a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786-particularly the remarkable indications of an ancient conflagration which the soil at a certain depth presented. Some considerable fragments of building, and other curious antiquities of the Roman age, were also brought to light in the course of that excavation. Near Sherbourn Lane, at about twelve feet under ground, the workmen came upon a pavement of about twenty feet in breadth, running across Lombard Street, "composed of small irregular bricks, in length two inches, in breadth one and a half, mostly red, but some few black and white: they were strongly cemented with a yellowish mortar, and were laid in a thick bed of coarse mortar and stones." Between this pavement and the Post Office, but along the north side of the street, ran a wall eighteen feet in length and ten feet high, its summit being ten feet under the level of the street, constructed of "the smaller-sized Roman bricks," and remarkable as being pierced by two perpendicular flues, the one semicircular in shape, the other rectangular and oblongthe chimneys, doubtless, of the long untenanted mansion of which the wall had formed a part. Directly opposite to the Post Office was another wall, and near it a tile-pavement; and still more to the eastward, another pavement, of small red bricks, intermixed with a few black ones and some white stones, in a state of great dilapidation. "This pavement," says the account in the Archæologia, "as well as most of the others, was laid on three distinct beds of mortar: the lowest very coarse, about three inches thick, and mixed with large pebbles; the second, of fine mortar, very hard, and reddish in colour, from having been mixed with powdered brick; this was about one inch in thickness, and upon it the bricks were imbedded in a fine white cement." Various other fragments of walls and pavements were encountered in proceeding farther to the eastward along Lombard Street-and also in Birchin Lane, where the corner was uncovered of a tessellated pavement, appearing to run under the adjacent houses, which exhibited a border of an elegant design composed of black, red, green, and white dies, each about a fourth of an inch square. Intermixed with these vestiges of a compact population were observed the wood-ashes and other traces of fire in the situation described in a former paper. Great quantities also of Roman coins were found, and of fragments of pottery and glass bottles, together with a few other articles, especially some keys and beads, specimens of which were introduced in one of the cuts in our Ninth Number. Among the coins were a Galba, a Nero, and an Antoninus Pius, of gold, and an Alexander Severus of silver; three hundred brass pieces, very rudely executed, of Tetricus (who assumed the imperial title † See No. IX. p. 151.

* See Archæologia, vol. xxiv. p. 300.

See p. 168.

in Gaul in the latter part of the third century) and of Constantine, were found together in a heap at the end of St. Nicholas Lane. The vessels and fragments of earthenware were of various colours, white, black, red, brown, grey, &c.; some were fine, others coarse; some glazed and some not; some had inscriptions on the rims; and many of those of the finest quality were ornamented with figures on the outside, which were often very spiritedly drawn. A richly-bordered design surrounding a large vessel of red Samian ware (engraved in our Ninth Number) exhibited an animated combat, in which figures both on foot and on horseback were opposed and mingled. Armed men, satyrs, hares, dogs, birds, foliage, a boar's head, and sundry fancy ornaments embellished other specimens. There were also many fragments of the round shallow vessels of close clay which have generally been regarded as mortaria, or triturating instruments; they seemed when entire to have measured about a foot in diameter, and had each a channel running across their broad rim, apparently for the purpose of pouring off their contents when ground.*

When we consider the evidence that the various facts we have enumerated afford of the existence in Roman London of many buildings which must have been of considerable extent and architectural sumptuousness, it naturally becomes matter of surprise that so few fragments should be found either above or below ground of the ornamental stonework which may be presumed to have been employed in their construction-that their chequered floors and unhewn foundations should be nearly all the memorials that remain of edifices whose external splendour must surely in some degree have corresponded with the strength and costliness which these vestiges indicate. A fluted pillar of four or five feet in circumference which was discovered in 1836 in an old wall of the Grey Friars' Monastery, now the Church of Christ's Hospital, and which is supposed to have been Roman, is almost the only specimen of the kind which has been noticed. It is the subject of a communication in the Archæologia from A. J. Kempe, Esq., who accounts for the general disappearance of such remains by the supposition that they were for the most part made use of in the construction of new buildings in the Saxon and early Norman ages. † And this no doubt was the fact in many cases. William of Malmesbury, writing in the twelfth century, expatiates upon the extraordinary quantity of Roman architecture still to be seen in all parts of England in his day, declaring that it exceeded what any other country on this side the Alps could boast of. That the ruins of the Roman towns served as quarries for the builders of subsequent times we may infer from what is related

*

Archæologia, vol. viii. pp. 116-132.

+ Id. vol. xxvii.

p. 410.

by Matthew Paris of two abbots of his monastery of St. Alban's in the tenth century—the first of whom, Ealred, he tells us, in breaking down the subterranean vaults of old Verulamium, and stopping up the arched passages, to prevent them from continuing to be lurking-places of thieves and haunts of debauchery, carefully laid aside all the tiles (or bricks) and stones he found fit for building; and the second of whom, Eadmer, the immediate successor of Ealred, is expressly stated to have erected the new monastery of St. Alban's with the materials thus obtained by himself and his predecessor out of the ancient Roman city. As he went on with the works which Ealred had begun, the labourers came upon the foundations of an ancient palace in the middle of the old city, in pulling which down they found in a cavity of a wall a number of books, covered with oaken boards and tied with strings of silk, one of which, we are assured, contained the Life of St. Alban written in the British tongue-the others related to the rites of the Gentiles. A passage to move the hearts of all antiquaries-most of whom, however, we fear, would have prized the Pagan far above the Christian portion of the library. Eadmer, for anything that appears, preserved neitherbooks, even though bound in oak, not being available as materials for building. However, the story goes on to inform us that, when they opened the earth to a greater depth, they found not only glass vessels containing the ashes of the dead, and burned earthenware vessels of various sizes and descriptions, but also stone tables, bricks, columns, and whatever else was wanted for the new fabric.* And indeed the rifling of the Roman ruins for such purposes continued to be practised, on a smaller scale, almost as long as any were to be found in the island-only the last century having witnessed the destruction of perhaps the most remarkable of all our ancient monuments-the famous Arthur's Oven on the banks of the Carron"its barbarous owner, a Gothic knight," having demolished it, Pennant tells us, to make a mill-dam with the materials-adding, what it is gratifying to learn, that "within less than a year, the Naiades, in resentment of the sacrilege, came down in a flood and entirely swept it (the mill-dam) away.”+ But, although the decayed or prostrate grandeur of old Roman London too may have in this way furnished a few sculptured pedestals, shafts, and capitals, to be broken down and hidden in the walls of the humbler structures of a later time, it is probable that that city was principally built, like our modern metropolis, not of stone but of brick—the convenient material which nature offered then as it does still in unlimited abundance on the spot, so that the most extensive ranges of architecture might be actually reared, almost like plantations, out of the very ground where they stood. It is the opinion, we may add, of Mr. Rickman, a first-rate authority on such subjects, that "nothing very good of Roman work ever existed in Britain.” "All the fragments of architecture which have been discovered," says he, whether large or small, whether the tympanum of a temple, as found at Bath, or small altars, as found in many places, I believe were all deficient either in composition or in execution, or in both, and none that I know of have been better, if so good, as the debased work of the Emperor Diocletian in his palace at Spalatro." +

* Viginti trium Abbatum S. Albani Vitæ.
Pennant's Tour in Scotland (in 1769), p. 212.

Letters on Architecture, in Archæologia, vol. xxv. p. 167.

It is probable, indeed, that Roman London, a commercial emporium rather than a luxurious capital, was distinguished not so much by any works of extraordinary architectural splendour as by the general prevalence of neatness, comfort, and a modest elegance in the dwellings of its inhabitants. The climate, for one thing, would probably be felt to be unsuited to any great attempts in the only style of architecture then known-both the lowness of the temperature for a great part of the year exacting sacrifices for the sake of internal accommodation unnecessary in the classical regions of the south, and the moisture of the atmosphere operating with more or less of injurious effect upon every species of external decoration;-obstacles that have yet only been partially overcome by the invention of another style better adapted to a northern sky. But the evidence both of remains and of records warrants the belief that, though it may not have been a magnificent, it was still both a populous and opulent city, and that here too grew and flourished that earlier civilization, which, differing in so many respects from our own, and presenting deficiencies which to our view seem so striking and so fundamental, was nevertheless undoubtedly one of the noblest forms into which our common humanity has ever expanded, and, besides a renown that can never die, has left some of the brightest examples and highest lessons in the arts, in letters, and in morals to all coming time, in virtue of which and of what of its institutions, or their spirit, ages of barbarism were not able to destroy, it must always remain a principal basis and active element of the civilization at least of our western world.