nothing of the kind. The nearest cantonal centre was Cirencester (Corinium Dobunorum) which was never a county town afterwards. York, the military capital of the whole county with its attendant municipium, is the natural capital of Yorkshire. But the Roman cantonal centre of the Brigantes was never there, but fifteen miles off at Aldborough (Isurium). The great tribe or confederation of the Brigantes, which gave the Romans so much. trouble, has perished utterly and left no historical memorial of its existence. Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) was left desolate, and the modern village does not even occupy its site. The county town of Berkshire (which must include part of the territory of the Atrebates) is Reading, which was never a Roman site. More striking still is Canterbury, an undoubted cantonal capital, the headquarters of the Jutish kings of Kent, the ecclesiastical metropolis of England, but not the county town of its own county. In fact, of the ten names given by the Ravenna geographer as cantonal centres, only three (Exeter, Winchester and Leicester) are modern county towns, and there is no evidence that their districts were anything like the modern counties.

In truth it is only in the civil towns, as distinct from the military centres, that we can expect to discover any evidence of the continuity of Roman civilisation. They were the distinctive feature of the Roman Empire, the very life of its being. Any real evidence that can be obtained on this subject will be of priceless historical value. It is not likely to be great. The medieval Welsh detested towns, as Giraldus emphatically states. The Old English people seem to have liked them little better, as their form of settlement was the open village. In a vast number of cases the evidence speaks clearly of discontinuity and desolation and death. But some instances remain. It would be pleasing to believe with Sir Laurence Gomme that the life of London is really continuous with that of Londinium; that Lincoln descends in fact as well as name from Lindum Colonia; and that the municipality of Eburacum developed into the northern capital of York. It is here, and here only, that we can hope to find any relics of continuous life, and the paucity of the evidence speaks clearly of the smallness of the influence.

Upon the alleged survival of Roman law a few words will be sufficient. Mr. Belloc evidently knows nothing of the subject, and his inclusion of law is little more than a rhetorical flourish.

It is supported by no evidence, not even by an assertion. No such evidence exists. On the continent there is plenty of evidence of the survival and ultimately of the recrudescence of the Roman law, but the English codes contain no trace of it. Later influences are not germane to the present subject, but every competent jurist is agreed that the English and the Roman are the two distinctive legal systems of the modern world. All civilised systems of law show a tendency to uniformity in actual contents, because civilised life tends to be uniform, but in outlook, in method, in reasoning, and in procedure, the way of the "civilians" is one and the way of the "common lawyers" is another. Attempts have been made at certain periods to introduce or "receive" the Roman law in England, but the reply of English lawyers supported by the English people has ever been the same: "We will not change the laws of England of old time used and approved."

Upon our present evidence the verdict is reasonably definite. Our main ideas, our philosophy, and our science derive from classical antiquity for "except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." Our art is part of the general European culture. The vast bulk of our literature is the same. Our faith is official Christianity, a Hellenised and Latinised form of an oriental religion in its many forms or aberrations. None of these things came to us by direct inheritance from the Roman Empire, but by importation after the cessation of the invasions and the settlement of the land. On the other hand our language is not Roman, but Teutonic in grammatical structure and in the common words. The English constitution is the English constitution, a native growth and no importation at all. Our constitution and our law spring from our own soil, things that others have tried to borrow of us, but we have borrowed of none. In a very real sense, England is part of the European continent, in the main stream of civilised development. In another sense equally real, it is insular and self-centred, the sceptred isle of freemen, the home of the common law.

H. J. RANDALL

IT

THE SYLPH

T seems strange that, though the gentle sylphlike personality of Mrs. Vesey flits often across the pages of Mrs. Montagu and of Horace Walpole, of Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Delany, of Wraxall and of Sterne, of Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale, no one has yet attempted any biographical sketch of the bright, winsome woman to whom Hannah More dedicated her famous Bas Bleu poem.

We know little more of her personal history than that she was the daughter of Sir Thomas Vesey, Bishop of Ossory, and was born about 1715; that she married first William Handcock, and secondly her cousin Agmondesham Vesey, who became a member of Johnson's Club; that she was a leading blue-stocking, whose salon in Bolton Row and Clarges Street was much frequented by the chief literary folk of the day, and that, after her husband's death in 1785, she gradually relapsed into a state of imbecility, in which she died in 1791.

A few letters addressed to her by Mrs. Montagu were published by Lord Rokeby, and a good many of Mrs. Carter's by her nephew; but of Elizabeth Vesey's own letters, I have come across hardly any in print, though she was undoubtedly a busy letter writer, and had a host of interesting friends.

That the woman who was caressed by Sterne, cherished by Horace Walpole, and beloved by so many of the brightest and best of her day, should have left so little of herself on record seems curious indeed; still more that there should be such scant chronicle of one whose drawing-room was an acknowledged centre of literary and social London, and the chosen after-dinner resort of the famous Club.

The sylphs were a race of air rather than of earth, and one imagines it was a certain volatile and vague tenuity of character and purpose that had given Mrs. Vesey her nickname. Wraxall, Fanny Burney and others have left amusing descriptions of her parties, her horror of formality, her desperate efforts to prevent the formation of a "circle," her absent-minded faux pas in conversation, and her pathetic efforts to catch (with the aid of several ear-trumpets) the scattered tit-bits of the talk.

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"She is an exceedingly well bred woman (Hannah More wrote), and of agreeable manners, but all her name in the world must I think have been acquired by her dexterity and skill in selecting parties and by her address in rendering them easy with one another."

Bennet Langton describes one of Mrs. Vesey's evenings to illustrate the high position to which Dr. Johnson's character had raised him. The ladies present included" the Duchess Dowager of Portland, Duchess of Beaufort (whom, I suppose, from her rank I must name before Mrs. Boscawen) and her eldest sister Mrs. Lewson, Lady Lucan, Lady Clermont and others of note; Lord Althorpe, Lord Macartney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Lucan, Mr. Wraxall, Dr. Warren, Mr. Pepys (the Master in Chancery) and Dr. Barnard (the Provost of Eton)." The company collected round Dr. Johnson's chair four or five deep, those behind standing and listening over the heads of those sitting near him. Dr. Johnson and Barnard led the talk. Wraxall, doubtless recalling this same evening, writes of Johnson that "those he could not vanquish by force of intellect he silenced by rudeness, and I have myself stood in the predicament I here describe."

Lord Harcourt, according to the Burney Diary, described Mrs. Vesey as "vastly agreeable, but her fear of ceremony is really troublesome; for her eagerness to break a circle is such that she insists upon everybody sitting with their backs one to another; that is, the chairs are drawn into little parties of three together in a confused manner, all over the room." Fanny's visitors, including Mrs. Cholmondeley, declared their instant resolve to adopt the Vesey triangles, which they promptly did. "You can't imagine a more absurd sight. Just then the door opened and Mr. Sheridan entered. . . . I could not endure my ridiculous situation, but replaced myself in an orderly manner immediately."

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One can imagine that Fanny's" orderly manner antipodes of what Horace Walpole sometimes called "Vesey chaos," declaring that she "collects all the graduates and candidates for fame, where they vie with one another till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel."

But as he got to know the Sylph better, even Horace Walpole could not withhold his liking; and by 1775 he confesses himself as at last" becoptied, enlisted in Mrs. Weesey's academy." Though

he allows that she was "sophisticated," he could not resist her spiritual appeal. "What English heart," we find him writing in 1787, to Hannah More, "ever excelled hers? I should almost have said equalled, if I were not writing to one that rivals her." Miss More herself found everyone at Mrs. Vesey's "from the Baltic to the Po, a Russian nobleman, an Italian virtuoso, General Paoli; the Provost of Eton, Mrs. Boscawen, Mr. Pepys, Mr. Walpole, and the Bishop of Killaloe, all in one corner together,' and was constrained to reflect that " she dearly loves company and is always sure to have too much." Never was there such a glutton for crowded social intercourse. Mrs. Delany, writing in 1784, tells us that, though in a declining way, the Veseys "still have spirit enough to engage in the tumult of assemblies or at least in large parties of company. Poor Mrs. Vesey is so deaf that when she is in company she carries her stool and cushion from one end of the room to the other to be near those that are engaged in conversation," generally arriving, as Miss Burney added, when the best of it had just evaporated.

All this gives us a true and lively picture of one phase of Mrs. Vesey's life; the only one which has so far been recorded in any detail. Her love of crowds, her craving for distraction, her quick vivacious inconsequent talk, these things one comes across now and again in almost all the letters and diaries and memoirs of her day; but that is all. Of the woman herself, of her thoughts and aims and longings, scarce anything has been vouchsafed to us; and of the personality of one who for more than twenty years was in the very forefront of the best London society, "where was everything witty and everything learned that is to be had," we have hitherto possessed only the most meagre outline. Pennington, who published a whole quarto volume of Mrs. Carter's letters to Mrs. Vesey, tells us that the letters of the latter "were remarkably beautiful; for she had a peculiar talent in describing scenery and events in language, flowing, picturesque and unaffected."

When the present writer was editing the correspondence of Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the Blues," he found, amongst the mass of her letters, over one hundred from Mrs. Vesey.

These letters prove to be to the full as ætherial," as inconsequent, as vague and chaotic as was, from all accounts, the Sylph herself. They are shot with shadows of sadness and reverie,