By some economic power which no one has explained, but which may be compared to the wealth of our smaller independent States to-day and their merchants, to Antwerp or to The Hague, this city of Mauretania rose to be a marvel. The porticos stretched along that rise of land, and a mile of new work, columns and pedestalled statues and arcades, looked down from the slope and saw, making for the shore, perpetual sails from the eastward. Great libraries dignified the city: a complete security and a humane consideration for the arts continually increased its glory. The passion for scholarship, which was at that time excessive, may have touched the palace here with something of the ridiculous. The king wrote, dictated, or commanded a whole shelf of books and was eager for the pride of authorship. But no other note of indignity entered their State, and all around them, looking out to sea, was a resurrection of Greece. This queen and her husband lived on into old age thus, untroubled in their isolation and their content, and destined (as they thought) to leave a dynasty which even the domination of Rome would protect and spare. Nothing is left. Rome seized their town at last. Their descendants perished. All Mauretania was compelled to follow the common line of unity. For four hundred years it has no history save that under the Roman order it endured and increased. The Vandals passed it by: it might still stand had there not fallen upon it the Mohammedan invasion which everywhere destroyed, or rather abandoned, a Roman endeavour. The neglect which was native to the Arab, the sharp breach which he made in tradition, ended Cæsarea. To-day, a little market town, a tenth of the old capital, barrenly preserves a memory of those two thousand years. A few fragments which the plough recovers or which the builders have spared are gathered in one place: the rest is parched fields and trees. [Sidenote: The Aqueduct] One conspicuous monument survives to emphasise the retreat of the empire. It is something the Arab could not waste because it did not lie within the circuit of the walls: its great stones were too remote from his buildings to be removed, and its mass too threatening to be undermined. It was the Aqueduct. This, for the most part, still stands, and carries an aspect of endurance which is the more awful in that nothing else of the city has endured. It spans a lonely valley in which the bay and the old harbour are forgotten, and it is as enormous as the name of Rome. [Illustration]