This spot where Cathedral and Hospital stand, and where the narrow streets with odd names plunge up and down and twist round unexpected corners, is indeed of a very high antiquity. One thousand eight hundred and thirty years ago, according to generally received opinion—that is to say, in A.D. 78—the Romans, in the reign of Agricola, came to this site, where now the tide of modern Manchester flows most strongly. They found a red, rocky bluff where is now Hunt’s Bank, overlooking the confluent rivers, and all around were forests and swamps, and doubtless the hoary ancestors of those withies after which Withy Grove was in later mediæval times named. The sole representative nowadays near Manchester of those ancient abounding swamps is Chat Moss, now a very negligible bog indeed, but even so recently as early railway days a formidable phenomenon to be reckoned with. But the rocky ledge overlooking Irk and Irwell was not unoccupied. A tribe of Britons had established themselves there; very securely, no doubt, against foes of their own calibre, but when the Romans came and found the situation desirable, their day was done. [Sidenote: _MANCUNIUM_] No account survives of the taking of that palisaded camp of the Britons. We know nothing of what happened to the aborigines, and it is so remote a speculation that I am quite sure no one in modern Manchester has ever given the matter a moment’s thought. Nor did any Roman historian narrate how many of the Empire’s tall soldiers sank under the weight of their armour and perished in the morasses at the taking of what is said to have been styled by the British _Maencenion_. The Romans, in their usual way, Latinised the native name for the place, and thus, from what they called _Mancunium_, springs, after many intermediate changes, “Manchester.” We know nothing of all these doings, but the building of _Mancunium_ is strikingly pictured in the first of the series of beautiful and interesting frescoes by Ford Madox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall, and with as certain and matter-of-fact a touch as though it had been drawn from personal observation. It was the Pre-Raphaelite way. In the picture you see the toiling slaves, working on the massive walls enclosing the Roman city; a helmeted centurion on the topmost windy height directing their operations. I do not know which impress me most, the cast-iron folds of his wind-blown cloak or the gigantic muscles of his bare legs, standing out like penny rolls. They were a great people, the Romans, and their muscular calf-development was apparently astounding.