Severus, on the frontiers of what he had firmly conquered, builds a wall across the island from sea to sea; which our author judges the most magnificent of all his other deeds; and that he thence received the style of Britannicus; in length a hundred and thirty-two miles. Orosius adds, it is fortified with a deep trench, and between certain spaces many towers or battlements. The place whereof, some will have to be in Scotland, the same which Lollius Urbicus had walled before. Others affirm it only Hadrian’s work re-edified; both plead authorities, and the ancient track, yet visible: but this I leave, among the studious of these antiquities, to be discussed more at large.—(_History of England_, _bk._ ii.) Spartian, moreover, invalidates his own testimony when he says, that the erection of this Wall was the greatest glory of Severus’s reign (_quod maximum ejus imperii decus est_). The Wall is indeed a magnificent work; it is, as Stukely characterizes it, ‘the noblest monument’ of Roman power ‘in Europe;’ but if reared by Severus, it is, a lasting monument of his failure. He came to Britain panting for renown—he resolved to reduce the whole island to his subjection—to make the sea-girt cliffs of Northern Caledonia his barrier. The efforts which he put forth were worthy of his resolve—‘In a word,’ says Dion Cassius, ‘Severus lost fifty thousand men there, and yet quitted not his enterprise.’ Were the abandonment of the Wall of Antonine, and the withdrawal of the frontier to the southern Isthmus, where Hadrian, eighty years before, had prudently fixed it, the glorious results of all his aspirations? Spartian assuredly errs, if not in saying that Severus built the Wall, at least in stating that this was the great boast of his reign. [Sidenote: OCCUPATIONS OF SEVERUS.]