But we pass on. Another picture is shadowed forth, and what is this that meets the gaze? The scene of fierce war and angry passions, of conquest and oppression, of barbaric rudeness and pagan splendour, is now a desolate and deserted waste, where the frail creations of man are blended with the ever-enduring works of God. The relentless foot of Time has pressed heavily upon these wrecks of human greatness—a few straggling walls, a ruined temple, pavements worn down by the tread of many a Roman foot, broken columns, with fragments of masonry, are all the vestiges that remain to denote the ancient importance of the Roman _Rigodunum_—all the signs that are left to point out where merchants gathered and where warriors prepared for conquest and for fame. The departure of the Roman legionaries inflicted a heavy blow on the fortunes of the city. The period of Saxon conquest was followed by the descent of the wild Scandinavian marauders—the Jarls and sea-kings of the North, who, with their piratical hordes, swept the country, leaving the red mark of death and desolation in their wake. What time the Raven flapped his gory wing, And scoured the White Horse o’er this harried realm; His crowded galley brought the dread Viking, Lust at his prow, and rapine at the helm. The splendour of Ribchester must have waned rapidly, for after the overthrow of Harold on the red field of Hastings, when the victorious Norman made his great survey of the conquered country, it had become so insignificant as to be accounted a mere village dependent upon Preston, then rising into note. Yet it did not escape the fury of the invading Scot, whose footsteps were everywhere marked with blood and destruction, for in one of those frequent incursions after the defeat at Bannockburn—when, as old Hollinshead tells us, the victorious Bruce marched his army through Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancaster to Preston—the miserable inhabitants were driven from their homes, and the place burned to the ground. Subsequently its fortunes revived, and for a time it could boast of having no less than three fairs, an evidence of its increased importance. In the unhappy struggle between Charles the First and his Parliament it was the scene of an encounter (April, 1643) between the Royalist forces, led by the Earl of Derby, and the Parliamentarian levies, commanded by Colonel Shuttleworth, resulting in a victory for the latter; and tradition says that five years later (August, 1648) Cromwell slept at the old white house, opposite the Strand, on the night before the memorable battle of Ribblesdale, and there, with Major-General Ashton, matured the plan of those operations which ere the next setting of the sun had proved fatal to the Duke of Hamilton, and tinged the flowing river with the blood of his Scottish followers as deeply as their ancestors had dyed it with English blood three centuries before. In more peaceful times, when the cotton trade