Everything is past but the names of men and places--names that we have and ideals that we make. A ford with Arthur’s name, a stone associated with his deeds, a city where his temples were reared! Tranquilly flows the river and washes the unfrequented banks; and Caerleon-upon-Usk, like a wave that has been spent and dies upon the shore, has ebbed into the quietude of tideless time and has been lost. Yet, to him who goes with open mind and simple faith, Caerleon is even now a wonderland, and fragments of its marvellous story are scattered on the roadside, in the undulating meadows, and along the banks of the wide brown river. Everywhere we find remnants of a remarkable past; and though the city has dwindled to a hamlet and is sequestered from the busy toiling world, it seems like the city of fable which slept until the promised prince came and released it from the fetters of enchantment. So may Caerleon one day be awakened. The healing sun-god, Belenus (from whose name our modern Billingsgate is derived), was the Celtic Apollo, and to him is ascribed the foundation of Caerleon. Others, with better reason, ascribe it to Lleon, an ancient British king. The Romans, about the year 70 A.D., made it one of their chief stations in Britannia Secunda, and the city in their time is reputed to have been nine miles in area. Akeman Street went from it to Cirencester, and the maritime Julian Way passed through it from Bath to Neath, while the mountain Julian Way connected it with Abergavenny. Fragments of a Roman fortress 12 feet thick and 1,800 yards in circuit have been found, and the Roman amphitheatre, 16 feet high and 222 feet by 192 feet in extent, is popularly known as the festival scene of King Arthur and his knights. Some of the Roman bricks and tiles are to be found in the modern structures, and part of the old Roman wall twelve feet high is still visible. In the days of Hadrian the best part of the city was Caerleon _ultra pontem_--that part lying beyond the wooden movable bridge, which is now replaced by one of stone.[19] The local museum is crowded with memorials of antiquity--tesselated pavements, Roman stones and inscriptions, baths, altars, sculpture, Roman lamps (found in a road cutting), glass vessels, bronze ornaments, harness buckles, keys, coins, and stone facings of the rooms in the Castle Villa. Most curious and valuable of all, perhaps, is a boundary stone showing that the sea-walls were the work of the third-century Romans and made by their soldiery. But the sea has receded from Caerleon and is now quite two miles away, and Newport has arisen where once the ships of Caerleon sailed. All the Roman temples which King Arthur found in the city he is said to have converted into Christian churches, St. Dubric, the most famous of the ecclesiastics of antiquity, being appointed the archbishop. On the other hand, the archbishopric is said to date from 182, and to have lasted until 521. But the remarkable and significant fact is that while