Something of all this is visible to mere mortal ken, and far more to him who adds to the material prospect a knowledge of the past and the distant. It is true that the vision thus beheld from the guarded mount of Lincoln is not equal to that far wider and more noble outlook from a more exalted pinnacle, upon the description of which Milton has poured forth in one glittering roll the full stream of his learning, illuminated by the fire of his genius, but it is nevertheless one in which the student of the past may well take delight. Lincoln itself is thickly strewed with the footsteps of the past. The Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Englishman, and the Norman, have successively been lords of the soil, and each has left his mark, either in material traces or in a nomenclature still less liable to decay. A great historian, our chief authority also in matters of topography, has pronounced the earthworks to the north of the city to be of British origin. If this be so, they must be the work of those Romanised Britons who attempted, though in vain, to hold their country against the Picts and Scots, and the Scandinavian hordes from beyond the German Ocean, and who, while so striving, showed some considerable acquaintance with the Roman rules of castrametation, though unequal, it would seem, to the works in masonry for which that people were so celebrated. The conclusion that these earthworks are, if not Roman, early post-Roman British, rests upon the fact that their outline is rectangular, and that the enclosure is bisected, nearly equally, by the Roman way. Of the earlier Britons, those dispossessed by the Romans, the traces are slight indeed, and probably confined to a few nearly effaced intrenchments, and to the roots of such proper names as “Durnomagus,” “Segelocum,” “Banovallum,” on the Bane river, and “Lindum,” names which probably, like “Eboracum” and “Londinum,” represent an earlier appellation. The mound at Riseholme, if sepulchral, may, of course, be of any age; but the district, possessing but few of those grand features which are usually the earliest to receive their names and the latest to lose them, has retained no very obvious traces of its primal inhabitants. Of their successors, the remains are of a very different character. The imperial mistress of the world left everywhere traces of her sway not easily to be obliterated. Her measures of war were also calculated—“pacis imponere morem.” From the station at Lindum great roads radiated in several directions, and preserved that facility of communication which civilised conquerors usually seek to establish.