It is best for a modern reader to forget these vagaries, and to found himself upon the constant judgment of permanent historical work--upon the common sense, as it were, of Europe as we receive it handed on through the historical traditions of the Middle Ages, and as we see it developing since the renaissance of learning in the sixteenth century. We can believe that Roman Britain, though we do not know its exact population, was very densely populated (Gibbon, the best authority, perhaps, puts it highest), and that, at least towards the close of the third century, it was full of flourishing towns, and intersected everywhere by great military roads; it was peaceable, wealthy, and a very close part of the Roman unity. [Illustration: NEAR PEVENSEY] [Sidenote: THE ROMAN TOWNS] Sussex was no exception to this rule. Small as was the extent of its then habitable or thickly-populated part (virtually confined to the coast-plain, for the Downs could not be inhabited, the villages of their foot-hills were few, and the belt between them and the Weald was difficult of access), small as was that portion, it contained two considerable towns--Anderida and Regnum. Anderida lay upon the site of Pevensey, Regnum is Chichester. What other settlements it had of a strictly Roman nature, as distinguished from the Celtic villages and the isolated farms held both by Celtic and by Roman masters, we cannot tell. The Roman remains of Lewes prove it (as does its site) to have been a place of importance since the beginning of history, but we cannot identify it with certitude. Arundel, a place obviously as old, has hitherto furnished no Roman relics. It is possible that Bramber was fortified; and it is fairly certain, though it is not positive history, that the mouth of the old estuary at Shoreham was the Portus Adurni. More than this we cannot say. But there is contained in Sussex a further and more striking evidence of the power of Rome than even the line of the wall at Chichester or the ruins of Anderida. This is to be found in the great track of the Stane Street, the Roman road which led from the East Gate of Chichester to London, and of which so large a part is in actual use to-day. This great monument of our past is equalled by little else in our island as a dramatic witness of the source from which we spring. The Roman wall between Tyne and Solway has afforded much more food for scholarship, and is in places of a more active effect upon the eye, but it does not appear before us as does the Stane Street, possessed of a constant historic use, and explaining the development of a whole district.