their disgrace that while there hardly is a second-
rate or third-rate town in Britain which does
not treasure in some building the memorials that
enrich and illustrate its history, London, the
city of most moment upon earth, and furnishing
the grandest of town histories, represents its
whole care for its own antiquities in having
admitted, not without difficulty, two or three old
stones to its Guildhall library, and having given
to another stone, houseroom upon the library
staircase:—whence it has been carried away
nobody knows when or whither, so much care was
taken of it. The valuable collection formed in
a few years by one much obstructed man, Mr.
Roach Smith, is now in the British Museum.
The most moderate attention on the part of the
City authorities, spread over a few generations,
would have produced a City Museum of the
Antiquities of London which men would have
been glad to travel from afar to study. One of
the stones in the City Library is part of a group
of three mother goddesses, drawn out of a sewer
cutting in Hart-street, Crutched Friars.

In digging the foundation of St. Martin's
church at Ludgate, in digging for Goldsmiths'
Hall, in digging for the new Royal Exchange,
wherever the digging may be within Roman
bounds, when it is deep enough discoveries are
made. Under the Royal Exchange there was
found what proved to be a gravel-pit which had
been used as a common dust-hole by the Roman
citizens. When the Excise-office was pulled
down, six years ago, between Bishopsgate-street
and Broad-street, a beautiful mosaic pavement
was discovered; Europa, in the middle of it, had
been sitting underground for at least sixteen
centuries upon her Bull. In the same
neighbourhood, a drain sunk in a cellar disclosed part
of another pavement that may have belonged to
another room in the same villa. In preparing
the site for the Hall of Commerce in Threadneedle-
street, more pavements were found of
Roman planning, under mediæval fragments of
the walls of the old Hospital of St. Anthony.
Between that part of Threadneedle-street and
Cornhill, wherever the ground is tapped, remains
of handsome old Roman suburban villas seem to
lie. From one hole made in this part of town,
there was fished up a female head, life-sized, of
coloured stones and glass. The handsomest of the
tesselated pavements that have yet been found, lay
buried nine feet under the flagstones before the
India House in Leadenhall-street. The central
part of it, representing Bacchus on the Panther,
is preserved in the library of the East India
House. A superb mosaic pavement was discovered
under Paternoster-row; there was another
dug into in Crosby-square; another in Fenchurch-
street (of which a whole peacock was uncovered);
another in Bartholomew-lane, near the Bank.
These were the Turkey carpets of the wealthy
Roman; hundreds of them lie buried under the
earth and press of traffic, on each side of London-
bridge. Fragments of wall painting, important
bronzes, statuettes of Apollo, of Harpocrates,
and so forth, toy goats and cocks, waterspouts,
vase handles and ornaments, lamps, hair-pins,
bracelets, bath scrapers, spindle and distaff of
Roman housewives; the pens, the weights, and
the steelyards of the men of business;
interesting remains of pottery, on which the
potters' marks have become, through the study of
antiquaries, in their own way as instructive as
inscriptions upon coins; and coins which, as
records, partake in the dignity of written
history, the earth under the feet of modern
Londoners already has yielded up.

When the great cuttings for the main drainage
of London penetrate more of our mysteries, are
there to be no skilled eyes authorised to watch
the spade of the navvy? Doubtless none. The
stray antiquary will be warned off the works, as a
weak-minded enthusiast; and on, the men of the
spades will go, ignorant of all that they may see,
and, as a swarm of white ants marching through
the substance of a shelf of records, careless of
what they may destroy.

But why should I, contented ghost, wish you
men to be inquisitive? I know under which
house in Threadneedle-street lie buried the floors
on which my Nævia nursed our little one,
the threshold over which we carried what was
left of her after the spirit fled. I know under
whose shop, we paced the garden of our villa
when the birds sang over Nævia, sobbing on
my breast under the apple-blossoms, and when I
looked out with fixed eyes between the tree-stems
on the pools that glittered in the broken moorland,
upon which our child had frolicked round us on
so many sunny days. That is no place to drive
a sewer through. Let our old homes lie buried,
then; let knowledge go. Respect the stolidness
of corporations, and the sentiment of sixteen-
hundred-year-old ghosts.

VERY COMMON LAW.

THOUGH not, strictly speaking, a legal
consequence of Mr. Blank's matrimonial venture, it
was a collateral contingency, urgently advocated
by the newly appointed sovereign of his
household, that he should take a more commodious
house.

He did not quite like the idea himself, and
he did not admire the process by which the
idea was to be carried out. How could he,
indeed? Did not Mrs. Blank wish, in consideration
of a ridiculously small rent, to occupy a
house which should be nothing less than a
domestic paradise, a house whose situation, for
example, should be salubrious, whose bedrooms
should be numerous and airy, whose reception-
room should be spacious and lofty, and whose
kitchens should be magnificent temples for the
performance of culinary rites? Did not that
unreasonable woman insist that hot and cold
water should percolate from the basement to
the highest attics; and that ball-rooms, and
conservatories, and elaborate kitchen ranges, should
be the natural attributes of her future home?

Moreover, the house agents with whom Mr.
Blank was brought into hourly commotion, did
not improve the matter. They were so dreadfully
unanimous in styling any enclosed space