expenses in their journeys should be paid. He contrasts the luxurious provision made for the personal accommodation of easy people like himself, with the hardships of the educational drudges, and in individual cases points out the cruelty of transferring a man of delicate health from the South of France to the North, &c.

As far, in short, as our materials for forming a judgment carry us, we should look on this part, brief as it was, of Joubert's career, as worthy of the highest respect. In another point of view we also admire him. Keenly as he felt the evils of his time, his mind was not closed against new ideas, and he saw the peculiar difficulties of men brought up in such a period of fluctuation and uprooting. "It is much harder," he said, "to be a modern than an ancient."

"Let us

strive," he says again, "to possess the merits of our time, if we cannot escape its defects; assailed by its evils, let us prize its compensations." There is no disdain of present teachings.

"We

ought always to keep some open space in our minds for the opinions of others. It is really unbearable to talk with men who have no unappropriated place in their brain,-let us have more hospitable hearts and minds.”

The period during which the mind of Joubert was thus actively engaged in public service was of course but short. With the fall of the Empire came the re-modelling of the university and the dispersion of the Grand Master and his men. No account of these events is given in the memoir, an omission which we regret, for, amid the innumerable histories of the Empire and the Restoration, we know not where to look for a complete history of education in France since the commencement of the present century.

As to M. Joubert himself, he re

turned to his habitual quietude, his

"Pensées, Maximes," and small books. Henceforth there is little to tell. Habitually an invalid, often a sufferer, he was, says his biographer, generally* cheerful and patient.

He seems to have received every visitation of disease in an humble and even grateful spirit, as a short note in his diary testifies. A severe illness having interrupted his entries for GENT. MAG. VOL. XXXVIII.

some days, in the blank space were inserted these words,

Ma grande et bonne maladie !
Deo Gratias!

The last of his entries in his journal seems an apt epitome of the objects of his pursuit through life,

Le vrai, le beau, le juste, le saint

And now as to the fragmentary treasures left behind.—The "Thoughts, Essays, and Maxims" are arranged by M. A. Joubert, or rather, we conclude, by M. Paul Raynal, under twenty-four divisions. They comprise thoughts on religious and moral questions, and matters of taste and criticism. They are of various and unequal merit, sometimes being too subtle and elaborate for easy comprehension, but often, nay mostly, ingenious, just, and full of calm sense and delicate feeling. As a critic of literature we know few writers who display more intimate acquaintance with the highest principles by which our judgments can be guided, and that "serious urbanity" of which he speaks as the true characteristic of the academic style never deserts him. How beautifully he characterises the writings of ancient philosophers! Take, for example, the fine thoughts on Plato and Aristotle (vol. ii. pp. 152, 153, 154), of which we would willingly translate the whole, but must content ourselves with one remark only,

Plato may teach us nothing directly, but he prepares and disposes us to learn and know everything. Reading him, we hardly know why, increases our susceptibility for distinguishing and admitting every noble truth that can present itself. Like mountain air he stimulates the organs, and gives a relish for wholesome food. Vol. ii. p. 154.

Again-Plato may be vanishing away in space, but one sees the flapping of his wings; one hears their rustling sound.

Open where we may, how just are mostly his thoughts on social ques

tions! take one at random- he is

speaking of order and chance, of good

and evil.

Never, surely, has a physical difficulty in the site of a great town been better conquered. Few would imagine, in traversing the level area of the New Market, the elegant thoroughfares of Market and Greystreets, the busy pavements of Dean-street, the Side, and Sandhill, that far below the feet there still flows a rapid stream, which once upon a time ornamented the gardens of the Franciscan Friars, was crossed by two ancient stone bridges, and, at the foot of the present Dean-street and Painter Heugh, formed a junction with the swelling waters of the Tyne, which floated up thither the barges of merchandise for the merchants who dwelt on the higher grounds; for, at the early day to which I allude, there were no houses or shops on the Side, the Sandhill, the Close, or the Quayside. The river flowed up to the bases of the hills on the tops of which the town then stood, and a large arm of the river was formerly to be seen where now the towering glories of Elizabeth's and James's days still rear their many-storied fronts, their projecting floors, and their long rows of casemented windows. The Sandhill, so named from a hill of sand being thrown up there by the tide, was at high water completely surrounded. At other times it was a place of public recreation for the inhabitants. But for the bridge, and probably a few

The Side, at Newcastle, 1844.

rude structures for the purposes of commerce, all this was a naked waste; the whole shore indeed, along the site of the present Close and Quayside, a sedgy strand. Having their wharfs at the head of the creek on the Lortburn, the inhabitants would do tolerably well without landingplaces on the shores of the river. Such a state of things, however, must have been found incompatible with the increasing trade of the town; by the days of the Edwards at least, quays had been built, and a defensive wall drawn along the principal, for in 1339 it is recorded that by a sudden inundation of the Tyne, the water surmounted and bore down a piece of the wall, six perches in length, near the WallKnoll, whereby many houses were destroyed, and 167 men and women, including priests, were drowned. The unlading of goods on the margin of the river, would soon suggest to the merchants the propriety of erecting their dwellings and warehouses close to their wharfs, so they procured the casting of ballast behind the quays to the base of the hills, and around the Sandhill and Side, to the depth of fifteen feet or so, and by this means raised for themselves a shore not liable to be overflown by the tide as formerly.

It was upon the most western and boldest of the three eminences to which I have

already referred that Hadrian erected the station of Pons Elii. It was the second camp upon his great barrier wall, which extended from the Tyne to the Solway. Though we have no grounds for supposing that the area of the station here would be larger than the generality of those on the line of this stupendous work, there is every reason to infer that a suburban population, very much greater than that attached to any other of the camps, would take shelter beneath its walls, and stud the green slopes with residences and gardens-with temples, and places of public amusement and resort. We may conclude that eighteen centuries ago a population was there to be found, wise enough to take advantage of the facilities which a noble river afforded them for the purposes of trade and commerce, and to congregate in more than ordinary numbers for that purpose. It is manifest that the requirements of the large body of troops in garrison all along the line of the wall would require a very large supply of provisions; and though we cannot doubt that agriculture was to some extent practised by the soldiery, and that every opportunity was at hand for the capture of beasts of the chase, yet it is capable of certain proof that their wine was imported, that their earthenware was not made in this country, that their ornaments of all sorts, and, in fact, everything besides the simplest products of the soil used and to be used by the various garrisons, must have been brought into the Tyne in ships; while, at the same time, as we discover them to have worked lead and silver mines, and, to all appearance, raised some quantities of the more precious metal, it seems equally certain that the Tyne-the station of Pons Ælii -must have exported the product. The precise site of the Roman camp here has long exercised antiquarian ingenuity and patience; but though it seems certain that it occupied the site of the present castle, and possibly comprised the ground upon which stands the church of St. Nicholas, all endeavours have utterly failed in ascertaining, with anything like certainty, its precise position and contents. Though masonry of undoubted Roman workmanship, altars, wells, pottery, coins, and other relics of that mighty people, render it indisputable that we are upon the right locality, it cannot be a source of wonder that a site which has undergone the vicissitudes attendant upon the continuous residence of a large and busy population, should present any very distinct traces of its primal condition, when viewed through the dim and lengthened vista of eighteen centuries. It is

rather to be wondered at, that considering the change which each successive generation has worked upon the original features of the place, so many secrets of the past should have been revealed to us as have from time to time been exhumed.

Horsley, in endeavouring to plot down the site of the camp, drew it in such a situation that, though his lines included as fine a rolling slope as Roman could desire, it was yet completely out of sight of the river and of command of the bridge. Providing his square was correct, these deficiences could no doubt have been compensated by the erection of additional works on the brink of the hill; but Hodgson, and I may add myself, conceive that the present castle was included within its walls, and that the Norman enceinte, or at least such part of it as occupied the brow of the hill, had been erected on the remains of the south-east corner of the station. Those, however, who contend that the Romans obstinately stuck to a rule when an advantage was to be gained by making an exception, will not approve of this view; and I must admit that the line proposed forms anything but a square. A few weeks ago a wall six feet in width, and possessing all the characteristics of the walls of the other stations on the line, was discovered running at right angles across the east end of Collingwood-street. Should this be taken for the eastern wall of the camp, the great wall itself must have come up to the north cheek of the gateway of that side of the camp, and recommenced in a similar way on the western rampart. The apparently conflicting accounts of the great wall having been discovered in front of the Assembly Rooms in Westgate-street, and also in the gardens behind St. John's church, which so closely adjoins, seem to be reconciled by supposing the latter masonry to have been a portion of the northern rampart of the camp, and the former the great wall itself, about to ascend Arthur's Hill on its western route.

We have all heard with great interest and satisfaction the ingenious, and I may say conclusive manner in which Mr. Hodgson Hinde has succeeded in identifying that portion of Newcastle called Pandon with the Ad Murum of Bede; but in doing this, and endeavouring to prove the antiquity of that place to be greater than that of her now more powerful sister, he presumes, as Bede does not mention a community residing at the station of Pons Ælii, that after the departure of the Romans it had ceased to be occupied by a settled population. It is true that Bede does not notice the site in question, but this might

arise from his not needing to do so. It was no part of Bede's purpose to write the topography of the district, and, as his point was ecclesiastical history, he confined his remarks to events of that class. Furthermore, if, as Mr. Hinde also successfully shows, Gateshead means the head of the gate or street which, by the Pons Ælii, was conveyed over the Tyne to the wall, beyond which it did not go, we have at once the definition of Ad Murum, and to all appearance an indication of its sitethe station and suburbs of Pons Elii, of which Pandon, only a few hundred yards to the east of the Roman bridge, may very well be considered a part; though it is very possible that, lying as it did in the bed of a deep ravine, and separated from the station by the intervention of an elevated ridge of considerable height and width, Pandon may have had a sort of independent existence from the parts lying further west. That Ad Murum, then, seems to apply at least as well to the station as to Pandon, seems tolerably certain. Mr. Hodgsou Hinde, having ignored the existence of Newcastle at the period in question, applies a salve to the wounded sensibilities of its modern sons in these words :"Viewing both villas as component parts of a united community, we have reasonable grounds for assigning to them a continuous existence from the reign of Hadrian to the present day." In the absence of any real proof to the contrary, however, we may well doubt that at the departure of the Romans the large body of people which must have established themselves in and about Pons Ælii would dissolve away into thin air. An occupation of some hundreds of years must have produced a mixed community of Roman, British, and Teutonic origin, whose interests would be best consulted by remaining where they were, and continuing to inhabit a place which, at the same time that it afforded them protection, had become endeared to them through ties of blood, affection, and lengthened residence.

Should it then be conceded that "where we find a modern city occupying the site of an ancient one it is more than probable that it has had an uninterrupted existence," it follows that the municipal independence of the boroughs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries "was not, as it has become a sort of maxim in law to believe, a boon granted from the crown by the Norman monarchs, but a right arising out of uninterrupted possession from a period of remote antiquity." Mr. Thomas Wright, M.A. who expresses these opinions, looking at the striking resemblance between the Roman municipal institutions and those of Britain, concludes thence not only that

the municipal forms and conditions of cities were derived from the former Roman occupants, and that they underwent no change upon the transfer of the English crown to a Norman line of sovereigns, but that municipal charters "are rather to be considered as a proof of the antiquity than the novelty of the privileges they grant."

It seems not an unfavourable idea that when certain old thoroughfares fall in well with the presumed, in many cases well-ascertained, line of Roman wall throughout the town, they may indicate the route of the attendant military way, and thus corroborate other evidence. For when a road has once been established it is natural to preserve it-houses built on its margin decay, and are replaced by others on the same site, the spot having become what may be termed private property-while that of the public, the road itself, would be infringed upon, and the attempt resisted, should any one venture to build into or across it. Thus is such a road perpetuated. It is with this view that I would indicate several of the old thoroughfares as being the persistent representatives of the military way. At the very outset, the present Stepney-bank, a road from time immemorial leading from the brink of the Ouseburn to the summit of the hill, stands precisely in the line of the ascertained course of the wall, while the till lately vacant ground north of the Keelmen's Hospital doubtless once might have yielded traces to the diligent observer of the same stony passage. Grey, indeed, in his Chorographia, written in 1649, alludes to a road leading thence all the way to Wallsend-a valuable testimony in favour of this view. Entering the crowded locality of the Wall Knoll the road appears to be at once indicated by the narrow street specially so called, winding easily round from the southern to the eastern side of that eminence, while the wall itself takes a more direct but increasedly precipitous course down to the open area called the Stockbridge. Imagine for a moment the Roman soldiers traversing their via, what course more likely than the line of the present Silver Street full in their face, while the wall, seeking to attain as rapidly as possible a more northerly position so as to form at no great distance a junction with the station, leaves the road by a small circuit to regain its defensive companion at the street known by the name of the Low Bridge. Thence by a single arch was the passage of the Lortburn effected. Nicholas churchyard has always been a thoroughfare, and Denton Chare (before the formation of Collingwood Street the only passage westward) appears to be the

St.