ledge, and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines, will never do for yours: it has awakened their intellects, and taught them how to think. The development of the popular mind in Scotland is a result of its theology."

the

The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had fallen: the mist cloud still rested lazily over the town; the rain dashed incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the pavement. It was miserable weather for an invalid in quest of health; but I had just to make the best I could of the circumstances, by scraping acquaintance with the guests in the travellers' room, and beating with them over all manner of topics, until mid-day, when I sallied out, under cover of an umbrella, to see the town Museum. I found it well suited to repay trouble of a visit; and such is the liberality of the Newcastle people, that it cost me no more. It is superior, both in the extent and arrangement of its geologic department, to any of our Scotch collections with which I am acquainted; and its AngloRoman antiquities, from the proximity of the place to the great wall of Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than in any other museum I ever saw,-filling, of themselves, an entire gallery. As I passed, in the geologic apartment, from the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from the newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral memorials of the Anglo-Roman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all belonging to one department. The antiquities piece on in natural sequence to the geology; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things, newer than the Tertiary,-of an extinct race,-of an extinct religion,-of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see again. And with but little assistance from the direct testimony

to war.

of history, one has to grope one's way along this comparatively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence. In at least its leading features, however, the story embodied is remarkably clear. First, we have evidence that in those remote times, when the northern half of the island had just become a home of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody regions of North America, and that its inhabitants were rude savages, unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few curious. arts which an after age forgot,—not devoid of a religion which at least indicated the immortality of the soul,-and much given The extensive morass, in which huge trunks lie thick and frequent, the stone battle-axe,-the flint arrow-head,the Druidic circle,-the vitrified fort,-the Picts' house,-the canoe hollowed out of a single log,—are all fossils of this early period. Then come the memorials of an after formation. This wild country is invaded by a much more civilized race than the one by which it is inhabited: we find distinct marks of their lines of march,-of the forests which they cut down,of the encampments in which they entrenched themselves,—of the battle-fields in which they were met in fight by the natives. And they, too, had their religion. More than half the remains which testify to their progress consist of sacrificial altars, and votive tablets dedicated to the gods. The narrative goes on: another class of remains show us that a portion of the country was conquered by the civilized race. We find the remains of tesselated pavements, baths, public roads, the foundations of houses and temples, accumulations of broken pottery, and hoards of coin. Then comes another important clause in the story: we ascertain that the civilized people failed to conquer the whole of the northern country; and that, in order to preserve what they had conquered, they were content to construct,

at an immense expense of labour, a long chain of forts, connected by a strong wall flanked with towers. Had it been easier to conquer the rest of the country than to build the wall, the wall would not have been built. We learn further, however, that the laboriously-built wall served its purpose but for a time: the wild people beyond at length broke over it; and the civilized invader, wearied out by their persevering assaults, which, though repelled to-day, had again to be repelled to-morrow, at length left their country to them entire, and, retreating beyond its farthest limits, built for his protection a second wall. Such is the history of this bygone series of occurrences, as written, if one may so speak, in the various fossils of the formation. The antiquities of a museum should always piece on to its geologic collection.*

*Some of the operations of the Romans in Scotland have, like the catastrophes of the old geologic periods, left permanent marks on the face of the country. It is a curious fact, that not a few of our southern Scottish mosses owe their origin to the Roman invasion. Of their lower tiers of trees, those which constituted the nucleus of the peaty formation, -many have been found still bearing the marks of the Roman hatchet, -a thin-edged tool, somewhat like that of the American woodsman, but still narrower. In some instances the axe-head, sorely wasted, has been detected still sticking in the buried stump, which is generally found to have been cut several feet over the soil, just where the tool might be plied with most effect; and in many, Roman utensils and coins have been discovered, where they had been hastily laid down by the soldiery among the tangled brushwood, and forthwith covered up and lost. Rennie, in his "Essay on Peat Moss," furnishes an interesting list of these curiosities, that tell so significant a story. "In Ponsil Moss, near Glasgow," he says, a leather bag, containing about two hundred silver coins of Rome, was found; in Dundaff Moor, a number of similar coins were found about forty years ago; in Annan Moss, near the Roman Causeway, an ornament of pure gold was discovered; a Roman camp-kettle was found, eight feet deep, under a moss, on the estate of Ochtertyre; in Flanders Moss a similar utensil was found; a Roman jug was found in Locker Moss, Dumfriesshire; a pot and decanter, of Roman copper, was found in a moss in Kirkmichael parish, in the same county; and two vessels, of Roman bronze, in the Moss of Glanderhill, in Strathaven." And thus the list runs on. It is not difficult to conceive how, in the circumstances,

66

The weather was still wretchedly bad, but I got upon the Great Southern Railway, and passed on to Durham, expecting to see in the city of a bishop a quiet English town of the true ancient type. And so I would have done, as the close-piled tenements of antique brick-work, with their secluded old-fashioned courts and tall fantastic gables, testified in detail, had the circumstances been more favourable; but the mistcloud hung low, and I could see little else than dropping eaves, darkened walls, and streaming pavements. The river which sweeps past the town was big in flood. I crossed along the bridge; saw beyond, a half-drowned country, rich in fields and woods, and varied by the reaches of the stream; and caught between me and the sky, when the fog rose, the outline of the town on its bold ridge, with its stately Cathedral elevated highest, as first in place, and its grotesque piles of brick ranging adown the slope in picturesque groupes, continuous yet distinct. I next visited the Cathedral. The gloomy day was darkening into still gloomier evening, and I found the huge pile standing up amid the descending torrents in its ancient grave-yard, like some mass of fretted rock-work enveloped in the play of a fountain. The great door lay open, but I could see little else within than the ranges of antique columns, curiously moulded, and of girth enormous, that separate the aisles from the nave; and, half lost in the blackness, they served to remind me this evening of the shadowy, gigantic colonnades of Martin. Their Saxon strength wore, amid the vagueness

mosses came to be formed. The felled wood was left to rot on the surface; small streams were choked up in the levels; pools formed in the hollows; the soil beneath, shut up from the light and the air, became unfitted to produce its former vegetation; but a new order of plants,the thick water-mosses,-began to spring up; one generation budded and decayed over the ruins of another; and what had been an overturned forest became in the course of years a deep morass,-an unsightly but permanent monument of the formidable invader.

of the gloom, an air of Babylonish magnificence. The rain was dashing amid the tombstones outside. One antique slab of blue limestone beside the pathway had been fretted many centuries ago into the rude semblance of a human figure; but the compact mass, unfaithful to its charge, had resigned all save the general outline; the face was worn smooth, and only a few nearly obliterated ridges remained, to indicate the foldings of the robe. It served to show, in a manner sufficiently striking, how much more indelibly nature inscribes her monuments of the dead than art. The limestone slab had existed as a churchyard monument for perhaps a thousand years; but the story which it had been sculptured to tell had been long since told for the last time; and whether it had marked out the burial-place of priest or of layman, or what he had been or done, no one could now determine. But the story of an immensely earlier sepulture,-earlier, mayhap, by thrice as many twelvemonths as the thousand years contained days,-it continued to tell most distinctly. It told that when it had existed as a calcareous mud deep in the Carboniferous ocean, a species of curious zoophyte, long afterwards termed Cyathophyllum fungites, were living and dying by myriads; and it now exhibited on its surface several dozens of them, cut open at every possible angle, and presenting every variety of section, as if to show what sort of creatures they had been. The glossy wet served as a varnish; and I could see that not only had those larger plates of the skeletons that radiate outwards from the centre been preserved, but even the microscopic reticulations of the cross partitioning. Never was there ancient inscription held in such faithful keeping by the founder's bronze or the sculptor's marble; and never was there epitaph of human composition so scrupulously just to the real character of the dead.