Evidence for the practice of arts in Londinium is really considerable. It was doubtless first of all a port, and probably originated as the seaport of the pre-Roman city of Verulamium; but it became the largest city in Britain, the chief distributing centre and the artistic capital. We are apt to think of Dover, or rather Richborough, as the chief port of the country, but London itself was the largest consumer, and the line of traffic was rather to the mouth of the Rhine than to Boulogne. Londinium was a little Alexandria in the West, and represented Britain as the other did Egypt. The building of such a city called together many able craftsmen—builders, sculptors, painters and mosaic workers. There must also have been shipbuilders and a due proportion of craftsmen-producers, potters, bone- and metal-workers, shoemakers, clothiers and the rest. An enormous quantity of pottery has been found, much of fine imported wares, but the most part varieties of native fabric, of which a large proportion was doubtless made of local clay. The site of St. Paul’s Cathedral was covered with “pot-earth,” and the town potteries seem to have been here. [Illustration: FIG. 134. ] _Native Pottery._—In the British Museum are some valuable MS. notes made in the years 1674-79, “by Mr. John Conyers, apothecary, at the ‘White Lion,’ in Fleet Street” (Sloane, 958, 816, 937). In mentioning St. Faith’s Chapel, at St. Paul’s, he says that his father and mother were there married forty-five years since (from 1677). Incidentally, he speaks of two brothers, and of being “at Epping Forest hunting ye hare, but ye frost prevented the scent.” This is a late example of the sporting customs of ancient London. His observations refer to excavations on the site of St. Paul’s and along the Fleet. In regard to the former it appears certain that there were a number of Roman rubbish pits on the site, similar to those recently excavated on the Post Office site. Here also were found pottery-kilns and glass furnaces with pottery, bone and other objects. This seems to have been a manufacturing quarter of the city unoccupied by dwellings. Some sketches show that the pottery kilns were circles of small diameter, having a raised floor supported on a central post, like a table, all of clay and broken stuff roughly formed; the lower stage or fire chamber was thus a ring around the central prop, and in the raised “floor” were several small holes. There must have been an external pit with a stoke-hole, and also a flue from the fire chamber. Four such kilns were found close together, forming a quatrefoil group. The dome of the kiln seems to have been roughly new formed over the pottery to be fired (Fig. 134). Conyers, in the account of finds on the site of St. Paul’s, gives sketches of the kilns found at St. Paul’s with several kinds of pots: “Figures of two kinds of kilns or furnaces of various pots, jugs, etc., of different kinds of earth and pottery. One kiln in loamy ground about 26 ft.