stalls, fortified themselves with earthwork, tilled
the ground, fished in the sparkling river, and
drank water from the running brooks. But
our Roman London was a great place. There
were handsome villas of merchants and others, at
the foot of its bridge on the south side of the
Thames; and the temples and streets of the town
itself were, if I remember rightly, on both sides
of Walbrook. Its main street ran, I think,
from the bridge northward in the line of what is
now called Bishopsgate-street, and a second
important street branching from this took the
course of the present Watling-street until it
left the town at Ludgate. At that western
side of Latin London, crowning the hill that
looked down upon the stream afterwards called
Holbourne, and the River Fleet—upon which
ships could row—upon the side of the town also
that sloped down to the river, the chief buildings
and temples stood. The street ending at
Ludgate passed into the high road to West
Britain, across Newgate, where there were on
each side of the road, tombs of the citizens, and
then along the wooded country slope now
covered by Fleet-street and the Strand. Money
made in London was then spent at Verulamium
(St. Albans), a resort of Roman fashion, where
there was a handsome theatre.

London, when I, the ghost, visited it in the
body and settled in it by reason of marriage
with the daughter of Cn: Melo, speculator
of the sixth legion, called Pia fidelis, was the
greatest town in Britain. It was a mile long
from Ludgate to the Roman Tower (which
stood where you have now another sort of
Tower), and it was half a mile across from
wall to wall. There was a wall on the river-
side in those days, but the river wall fell early
into ruin. London-wall was about twelve feet
thick, and about thirty high, with a case of
rubble and a smooth facing of stone cemented
with a concrete, reddened by the use of pounded
tile, so that it has been said to have been
tempered with the blood of beasts. As the bounds
of the town extended, the course of the wall was
altered, I believe; but its roots now in the
ground seem to show that at last—after my
lifetime—it must have run along the east side of
Walbrook, along the course of the present
Leadenhall-street and Cornhill, taking the line
of your Billiter-street and Mark-lane eastward.
Bridgegate, Ludgate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate,
were the main gates near the centre of each
wall in the irregular square they all enclosed.
From Ludgate, the wall crossed the site of the
Times printing-office, and diverged thence to
St. Andrew's-hill before reaching the river. That
the Roman city had been smaller than this, you
may be very certain, because Roman dead were
not buried inside towns, and remains of
Roman cemeteries are under Bow-lane, Moorgate-
street, and Bishopsgate Within. There were
square towers in the wall, with little chambers
hollowed from the middle of their solid substance,
furnished with small windows, out of which the
watchman could look for the coming of an
enemy. Decorated marble buildings had been
raised and had fallen in our Roman London
before the great river wall was built, as you
may know by the sculptured fragments from the
wreck of public buildings which are among the
stones found in the substance of its strong
foundations. When there was strife and inroad upon
cities, there must have been much breakage,
more particularly at the beginning and the end
of Roman occupation. In labouring at the
foundation of the present London-bridge, so
many works of art, besides Hadrian's great
bronze head, were found in the river-bed, that
they seem to have been thrown intentionally
over the rail of the old bridge by which London
was entered from the south.

Under the stream, deep in the river-bed on
either side of London-bridge, and anywhere
under the ground within about half a mile from
Fish-street-hill—which you may consider to have
been in the middle of our Roman London—only
dig deep enough and you will find the ornaments
we set up in our public haunts, the tesselated
floors we trod, strewn with the shoes we wore,
the broken fragments of the dishes out of which
we ate, the rim of the cup touched by the lips
of Nævia when I quaffed to her, the ring she
gave me when we plighted troth, the toys our
little daughter played with before we laid her in
that cemetery from which you have dug up so
many sacred memorials of love that blossomed
sixteen centuries ago. Some of that love is
even now in its ripe fruitage.

London to-day is taller by some fifteen feet
than London of the Romans. Whatever pierces
on the site of the old town fifteen feet, more or
less, below the pavements upon which you are
now treading—be it sewer, church foundation,
or other gash into the soil—it will strike
pretty surely upon the streets and pavements of
the buried city, and make you, at any rate,
possessor of some of the money for which its
citizens then toiled, as they toil now for coins
with later superscriptions. Filled with a ghostly
wrath, let me pause here for a wail over the
corporation which has so long neglected all
opportunities of doing credit to itself in the
administration of affairs of London. Here was
our bygone world under their feet; they could
not help perpetually digging their spades through
it, and they would see nothing; they would not
even furnish houseroom to the records of the
past, in coins and monuments, and all the petty
relics of the life of Rome upon the Thames that
were forced into their hands whether or not
they would take them, and were cast aside! And
when a wisely zealous antiquary, Mr. Roach
Smith, living within the City, made it his care to
inspect every deep cutting for which there arose
from time to time occasion, to observe what was
brought to light, and to rescue some of the
precious memorials of which the ground is full, his
visits to the public excavations were at best but
tolerated, and usually access was denied him. The
fault, however, does not all rest with the
corporation. The citizens themselves, in a large
meeting, refused the impost of a halfpenny in
the pound for a library and a museum. It is