"where a splendid embassy came to him from the Londoners, desiring his alliance and protection, and that he would restore their prince Mandubrace, who was then in his retinue." "To his little camp, or prætorium, on this account," adds our communicative recorder of these long-past transactions, "he orders another to be drawn round it, for reception of these ambassadors and their prince, together with forty hostages, which he demanded, and corn for his army." A second "appendix" to this camp was afterwards ordered for the reception of other ambassadors who came from the Cenimanni, the Segontiaci, &c. Having finished his business with these deputations, Cæsar then moved forward to attack Cassivellaunus, or Casvelhan, as the name ought properly to be written, who had retreated to his fortified town at Watford-throwing up other camps, the description of which we omit, on his way. After he had reduced Casvelhan's two strongholds of Watford and Rickmansworth, and compelled the unfortunate king's complete submission, he turned to London, and set out on his march upon that capital, "effectually to serve his friend and ally Mandubrace, whose protection he had undertaken, in the kingdom of the Trinobantes, and reconcile him to his subjects and his uncle Casvelhan." Mandubrace, it seems, was the son of Immanuence, the same who by the British historians is commonly called Lud, that is, the Brown; Lud, or Immanuence, had been put to death by his ambitious brother Casvelhan, who had usurped his throne, and forced Mandubrace to fly to Gaul to implore the aid of Cæsar. Such was the true origin of Cæsar's invasion— although, strangely enough, he chooses in his own account to be altogether silent, possibly out of modesty, in regard to facts which would have gone so far to justify what otherwise has so much the air of an unprovoked aggression. However, to the capital of the Trinobantes he proceeded, to put the finishing stroke to his disinterested expedition. "It was not suitable," continues our author, "to his honour or his security to quarter in the city of London; but he pitched his camp where now is Pancras Church; his prætorium is still very plain, over against the church, in the footpath, on the west side of the brook; the vallum and the ditch visible; its breadth from east to west forty paces; its length from north to south sixty paces. This was his prætorium, where his own tent was pitched in the centre; the prætorian cohorts around it. There was no great magnificence in Cæsar's tent, here placed; it was not his manner. . . . . When I came attentively to consider the situation of it, and the circumjacent ground, I easily discerned the traces of his whole camp: a great many ditches, or divisions of the pastures, retain footsteps of the plan of the camp; . . . .. and whenever I take a walk thither, I enjoy a visionary scene of the whole camp of Cæsar; . . . a scene as just as if beheld, and Cæsar present." And again :-" North of the churchyard is a square moated about, in length north and south forty paces, in breadth east and west thirty; the entrance to the west. It was originally the prætorium of Mandu brace, king of London, and of the Trinobantes. The ditches have been dug deep to make a kitchen-garden for the rector of the church, from whom I suppose in after-times it has been alienated. Hither Casvelhan was sent for, and reconciled to his nephew, enjoined not to injure him as an ally of Rome, assigned what tribute he should annually pay, what number of hostages he should send to him into Gaul, &c." All this, it must be confessed, bears a portentous resemblance to the harangue of the worthy Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns on the ancient fortifications discovered at the Kaim of Kinprunes:

"Here, then, let us take our stand on this tumulus, exhibiting the foundation of ruined buildings, the central point—the prætorium, doubtless, of the camp. From this place, now scarce to be distinguished, but by its slight elevation and its greener turf, from the rest of the fortification, we may suppose Agricola to have looked forth on the immense army of Caledonians," &c. &c. It is difficult, with this scene in one's memory, to read Stukeley's elaborate dissertation without anticipating the sudden intrusion of some Edie Ochiltree, with his "Prætorian here, prætorian there, I mind the bigging o' t."

[Cæsar's Camp at St. Pancras Church; reduced from the Plan in Stukeley's 'Itinerarium Curiosum."]

Whether any traces of this St. Pancras camp of Cæsar's, or Stukeley's, are still supposed to be distinguishable, we do not know; nor indeed are we aware that it has ever revealed itself to anybody, its discoverer himself excepted—whose description, published in the Second, or posthumous, Century of his Itinerarium Curiosum, is dated October 1758. Yet some of the particulars he notices are curious enough. The fact of a Roman encampment having once occupied this ground he conceives to be attested by the name of the Brill, which is still given to what was formerly a hamlet a few hundred yards to the south of the churchyard, and is now a nexus of lanes and courts behind the west side of Brewer Street. A tavern at the southern extremity of that street is also, we believe, called the Brill. The Brill is the name of a village in Buckinghamshire, which Camden thinks must have been an old Roman station from the number of Roman coins that have been found in it; and he supposes the name to be a contraction of Bury or Burgh Hill, which is what the Saxons would have called an ancient fortified place on an elevated site. The former importance of this Buckingham

shire Brill is further evidenced by its having been a royal village of Edward the Confessor. Camden also mentions a Roman camp near Chichester which retains this same name of the Brill or the Brile. And we have the town of Briel, or the Brill, as it is often called, in the isle of East Voorn, in the Netherlands, which is supposed, as well as our St. Pancras Brill, to have been originally one of Cæsar's camps. It is remarkable, too, that Stukeley, when he proceeded to survey this camp by pacing its boundaries, should, as he tells us, have "found everywhere even and great numbers;" that is, that the lines of limitation and intersection were each of the exact length of forty, fifty, four hundred, five hundred, or some such number of paces. But possibly in so obscure a matter the round number of paces was sometimes found serviceable in determining the position of an all but invisible division or angle.

However all this may be, Stukeley assures us that in this camp at Pancras Cæsar made the two British Kings, Casvelhan and his nephew Mandubrace, as good friends again as ever; "the latter, I suppose," adds the worthy Doctor, "presented him with that corslet of pearls which he gave to Venus in the temple at Rome which he built to her as the foundress of his family." Why this one fact in particular should be stated as a mere supposition, we do not understand.

But the most undoubted as well as the most numerous relics of Roman London have been preserved under ground-beneath the protecting "paste and cover" of the dust and rubbish which fourteen centuries have deposited upon the original floor of this great gathering-place of human beings, and centre of industry and commerce. The modern Londoner dwells at what was a considerable height up in the air to his predecessor of the Roman age-in general from about fifteen to twenty feet, as we observed in our former paper, overhead of the ancient city; and most memorials of the latter and of its inhabitants are, of course, buried to that depth in the earth. In former times excavations were probably seldom made to the requisite depth, and when they were, the discoveries that were made were for the most part left unrecorded and were soon forgotten; but the more extensive operations that have been carried on for the improvement of the capital since the epoch of the Great Fire have brought to light a considerable portion of the antiquarian wealth of what is called the Roman stratum, consisting of tessellated pavements, foundations of buildings and other architectural remains, coins, urns, pottery, and utensils, tools, and ornaments of a great variety of descriptions.

Unfortunately, no complete account has been preserved of the discoveries made by Wren, who, in the course of surveying the ruins of the city after the fire, and superintending the rebuilding of St. Paul's, and of other parts of it, had opportunities of examining what lay deep under the surface of the earth in all the principal localities. The article of greatest interest which is mentioned as having come into his hands was a small sepulchral monument of stone, exhibiting both an inscription and an effigy, which was found near Ludgate. It is now among the Arundel Marbles at Oxford. The stone is so much mutilated that neither the words nor the figure can be quite distinctly made out; and the various copies that have been given of both must be regarded as in some particulars rather conjectural restorations than accurate transcripts. The inscription, however, commencing with the usual formula, D. M., for Diis Manibus, intimating a dedication to the Manes or departed spirit of the deceased, seems to record that the stone was erected by his most loving wife Januaria Marina (or perhaps Matrina), in memory

of Vivius Marcianus, a soldier of the Second Legion. It has been commonly assumed from the dress in which he is represented that Marcianus must have been a native Briton; but we may remark that it was not usual for the natives of any of the provinces who were taken into the armies of the Empire to be allowed to serve in their own countries. If the person to whom this monument was raised, therefore, was a barbarian at all, it is most likely that he was of other than British birth. But in truth nearly all the points of his attire and accoutrements are so uncertainly delineated on the mutilated stone that anything like a complete or consistent picture of the whole can only be made out by an exercise of fancy. We give the most approved version of the rude and halfobliterated sculpture, representing the deceased, according to Pennant's description, "with long hair, a short lower garment fastened round the waist by a girdle and fibula, a long sagum or plaid flung over his breast and one arm, ready to be cast off in time of action, naked legs, and in his right hand a sword of vast length, like the claymore of the later Highlanders: the point is represented resting on the ground: in his left hand is a short instrument, with the end seemingly broken off." Pennant regards this as the picture of "a British soldier, probably of the Cohors Britonum, dressed and armed after the manner of the country." But it might serve very well, in truth, for that of any Roman soldier. However, in other professed copies of the figure both the hair and the sword are short, instead of long; the sword is held across the body, instead of with its point resting on the ground; and the cloak is brought not over the right shoulder and arm, but over the left! "Such tricks hath strong imagination" in our draughtsmen and engravers.

[Sepulchral Stone found at Ludgate.]

Wren conjectured that this soldier might have been buried in the vallum of what he, or the writer of the Parentalia, calls the Prætorian camp, which must mean the encampment of the officer holding the chief command at London when it was a mere military station. Of course there was nothing that could with any propriety be called a prætorian camp among the permanent features or appendages of Roman London, although the antiquarians are in the habit of repeating after one another that the eminence on which St. Paul's now stands was appropriated to that purpose. Possibly, however, the city may have been guarded by a fortress in this neighbourhood-though it is more likely that such an erection would be placed on the bank of the river, where Baynard's Castle or the Castle of Montfichet was afterwards built, than on the site of the Cathedral. And the precinct of a fort so situated might very well have extended as far northwards as the spot where the monument of Marcianus was found. In fact we know that in

*Some Account of London, p. 16.

a later age the fossa or ditch of the royal fortress called the Palatine Tower, which appears to have occupied the same site with Baynard's Castle, included part of what is now St. Paul's Churchyard; for when Bishop Richard de Beaumeis in the reign of Henry I. built the first complete wall around the churchyard he obtained a grant from the King of so much of the said ditch as should be required for the wall and a street outside of it. Nay, the words of the charter seem to imply that the foss had also partially encompassed the church on the north side before it had been encroached upon by the Bishop's operations.* The probability, therefore, is, that during the Roman occupation the fort at the western extremity of the city may have stretched its boundaries from the river as far as Ludgate-which would scarcely be a greater extent of space than seems to have been embraced by the limits of the similar stronghold in the east, situated where the Tower now stands. We have had occasion to notice in a former paper several military monuments resembling the Ludgate stone which were found in the latter neighbourhood on different occasions in the latter part of the last century;† as well as some coins and an ingot of silver-which last, found in 1777, among some foundations of ancient building on the site of the present Ordnance Office, and bearing the name of Honorius, is supposed to have been transmitted from the imperial mint for the purpose of ascertaining the purity of the coin sent along with it—perhaps the pay for the last Roman legion ever stationed in Britain. In July 1806, among other ancient remains, there was dug up at the back of the London Coffeehouse, very near the spot where the Arundel monument was found, another sepulchral monument with an inscription intimating, apparently, that it had been raised to his deceased wife by a person named Anencletus-—— whom Gough, from the epithet Provincialis, conceives to have been a soldier belonging to a troop raised in the province. The wife, called Claudina Martina, is described as having been only eleven years old, if the reading of the inscription may be trusted. But perhaps something has been obliterated at this place; for it was not customary, if it was even legal, for females among the Romans to marry at so early an age. The inscription was cut on the front of a hexagonal pedestal, bordered with foliage; along with which were found a mutilated head of a woman, and the trunk of a statue of Hercules, half the size of life, leaning, as usual, on his club, and with the skin of the Nemean lion thrown over his left shoulder.

Among the most interesting relics of the Roman occupation are the various tessellated pavements that have been brought to light in different parts of the City. The custom of ornamenting the floors of their apartments by figures formed of tesseræ, or small pieces of coloured pebble, marble, artificial stone, and glass, was probably not introduced among the Romans till after the destruction of the Republic. Suetonius notes it as one of the sumptuous habits of Julius Cæsar in the latter part of his career that he used on his marches to carry about with him such pavements, or rather, probably, quantities of the materials for

* The words are "Tantum de fossato mei castelli ex parte Tamesis ad meridiem quantum opus fuerit ad faciendum murum ejusdem ecclesiæ, et tantum de eodem fossato quantum sufficiat ad faciendum viam extra murum; et, ex altera parte ecclesiæ ad aquilonem, quantum prædictus episcopus de eodem fossato diruit."— Dugdale's Hist. of St. Paul's Cathedral, by Ellis, Append. p. 365. The expression ad aquilonem can hardly be understood as meaning on the north side of the castle, the preceding ad meridiem clearly referring to the south

side of the church.

+ See No. IX. p.

159.