One or two examples of rapid cursive writing have been preserved on bricks and tiles. Fig. 128 gives some letters of interesting form from a tile at the Guildhall. The A, G and M are on the way to be transformed into—a, g and m; apparently the hook of the “a” had its origin in the overlapping termination at the apex in the monumental inscriptions. Fig. 129 is from a still more rapid scribble; L, T and E here approach our modern handwriting forms. These examples are enough to show how the more cursive writing styles and our own handwriting have been developed from the Roman capitals. Roman books and correspondence were written in such hands, and Dr. Haverfield has pointed out, as such scribblings on tiles were obviously in many cases by labourers in the brickfields, it follows that the common people in British towns had come to talk Latin. Dr. Haverfield went on to question whether town workmen even _spoke_ Celtic. “Had they known Celtic well, it is hardly credible that they should not have sometimes written in that language. No such scrawl has been found in Britain. This total absence of Celtic cannot be mere accident” (_Romanization_). This argument overlooks a probability that Latin was a _written_ language, while Celtic was not. We hardly realise our direct and full classical inheritance, and the fact that Londinium was a Roman city for three and a half centuries. Here the Latin Pantheon must have been completely absorbed into the common texture of traditional thought; here boys would have carried texts of Virgil in their satchels, and here, again, the story of the Gospel must have been brought in its first westward expansion. _Inscriptions._—In the notes which follow, I am more than ever off my proper ground, and, moreover, they are likely to be very dreary to any one who does not feel the romance of early London and Britain through all the dryasdust detail in which we have to work. An important inscription was found in 1850 under St. Nicholas Lane. It was described in the same year (_Gent. Mag._ xi. p. 104): “A large slab with the following Roman inscription in well-cut letters 5 in. or 6 in. in length: N V M C P R O V B R I T A It is doubtful if the fourth letter in the first line be C or O. The stone is in fine preservation, and others ought to have been discovered, but the excavators were not permitted to turn either to the right or to the left, notwithstanding a gentleman offered to pay any expense.” This must have been Roach Smith, who, as the practical repetition of the phrases given below shows, must have been the author of the note. An MS. letter, which is in my possession, is as follows: “STROOD, _Wednesday_, P.M.