The Chevenixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two pairs of stairs is what they call Mr Chevenix’s library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame telescope without any glasses.  Lord John Sackville predeceased me here and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which has been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.

You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all tranquility while a Parliament is bursting about my ears.  You know it is going to be dissolved....  They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won’t carry—­he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.

There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about-town, almost precisely echoing Horatius Flaccus, the man-about-town; and this (if you will bring your minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Roman colonist in Britain would open upon, out of his parcel of new books, and read, and understand, some eighteen hundred years ago.

What became of it all?—­of that easy colonial life, of the men and women who trod those tessellated pavements?  ‘Wiped out,’ say the historians, knowing nothing, merely guessing:  for you may with small trouble assure yourselves that the fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this island are a blind spot, concerning which one man’s guess may be as good as another’s.  ‘Wiped out,’ they will commonly agree; for while, as I warned you in another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a difficulty, tends to remove it conveniently into a category to which it does not belong, still more prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out of existence altogether.  So ‘wiped out’ is the theory; and upon it a sympathetic imagination can invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departing legions, the last little cloud of dust down the highway, the lovers by the gate watching it, not comprehending; the peaceful homestead in the background, ripe for doom—­and what-not.

Or, stay!  There is another theory to which the late Professor Freeman inclined (if so sturdy a figure could be said to incline), laying stress on a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, faced by the Saxon invader, got together their money, and bolted away into Gaul.  ’The Romans that were in Britain gathered together their gold-hoard, hid part in the ground and carried the rest over to Gaul,’ writes Gildas.  ’The hiding in the ground,’ says Freeman, ’is of course a guess to explain the frequent finding of Roman coins’—­which indeed it does explain better than the guess that they were carried away, and perhaps better than the schoolboy’s suggestion that during their occupation of Britain the Romans spent most of their time in dropping money about.  Likely enough, large numbers of the colonists did gather up what they could