Siscia, Poetovio and Celeia and Emona, they have wholly gone; you may walk across the sites to-day and seek them in vain in modern street or hedgerow or lane.  In Gaul there were many Roman municipalities in the south; there were many towns of lesser rank but equal wealth in the centre and west and north.  But we owe our knowledge of their town-plans to an inscription from Orange and to some excavations at Autun and Trier.  Cologne and Trier alone, or almost alone, keep Roman streets in modern use, and they are significant.  Both became Roman towns in the first century; both held colonial rank; both have lived on continuously ever since and hardly changed their names.  Yet both bear to-day the stamp of the Middle Ages, and the Roman streets which they use are small and nearly unrecognizable fragments.

There is, indeed, no law of survivals.  Chance—­that convenient ancient word to denote the interaction of many imponderable forces—­has ruled one way in one place and otherwise in another.  Sometimes monuments have alone survived, sometimes only streets, and we can seldom give reasons for this contrast of fates.  At Pola, gates, temples, and amphitheatre still tell of the Roman past and the modern town-square keeps so plainly the tradition of the Forum that you cannot walk across it without a sense of what it was.  Yet not a single street agrees with those of the Roman ‘colonia’.  In the Lombard and Tuscan plains, at Turin and Pavia and Piacenza, at Florence and Lucca, the Roman streets are still in use, just as the old Roman field-ways still divide up the fertile plains outside those towns.  But, save in Turin, hardly one Roman stone has been left upon another.  In the no less fertile plain of the lower Rhone, at Nimes and Arles and Orange, the stately ruins wake the admiration of the busiest and least learned traveller; of the Roman streets there is no sign.

Britain has enjoyed less continuity of civilization than any other western province; in Britain the survivals are even fewer.  In London, within the limits of the Roman city, no street to-day follows the course of any Roman street, though Roman roads that lead up to the gates are still in use.  At Colchester the Roman walls still stand; the places of the Roman gates are known; the masonry of the west gate is still visible as the masonry of a gateway.  But the modern and ancient streets do not coincide, and the west gate, which has so well withstood the blows of time, can hardly be reached by road from within the city.  At York the defences of the legionary fortress have still their place in the sun, but the ‘colonia’ on the other bank of the Ouse has vanished wholly from the surface, walls and streets together, and the houses of the citizens of Eburacum are known solely by finds of mosaic floors.  At Lincoln the Roman walls and gates can easily be traced and one gate rears its arch intact, but the Bailgate alone follows, and that erratically, the line of a Roman street.  The road from the Humber, thirty miles north of Lincoln, runs to-day, as it has run for eighteen centuries, under the Newport arch and through the modern town and passes on southwards.  That long straight road has given a feature to Lincoln, but it is a feature due to the Roman highway outside the town, not to the streets within it.  Lincoln itself is as English as Cologne and Trier are German.