We must now take leave of this important part of our subject, the masonry of the Wall. Judging from those portions of it which remain, it may safely be asserted, that no structure can be conceived to possess greater strength and durability. The first time I happened to visit Bowness (in the year 1831), some portions of the Wall, seven feet high, were in the course of being removed; it was found necessary to resort to the force of gunpowder in order to effect its destruction. In the substantial nature of their works, the Romans have left the impress of their own mighty minds. They built not for the day. They did not conceive that their existence was bound up in the fate of a single generation, but that it was spread over the destinies of succeeding ages. Their works contrast strongly with the efforts of some modern builders. The editor of the pictorial volume, styled ‘Old England,’ seems, in the following passage, to speak from personal observation. Passing by the fragments of which we have spoken, we are under the north wall [of Richborough]—a wondrous work calculated to impress us with a conviction that the people who built it were not the petty labourers of an hour, who were contented with temporary defences and frail resting places. The outer works upon the southern cliff of Dover, which were run up during the war with Napoleon, at prodigious expense, are crumbling and perishing, through the weakness of job and contract, which could not endure for half a century. And here stand the walls of Richborough, as they have stood for eighteen hundred years, from twenty to thirty feet high, eleven or twelve feet thick at the base, with their outer masonry in many parts as perfect as at the hour when their courses of tiles and stones were first laid in beautiful regularity. [Sidenote: ITS EVENTUAL DECAY.] If the meddling hand of man had been withheld from the Barrier of the Lower Isthmus, the Wall might have stood, even to the present hour, in almost its original integrity. It is necessary to say ‘almost,’ for nothing can be more correct than the observation of Hodgson— Though man has had the chief labour in effecting its destruction, its whole line and all its stations, castles, and towers, ever since it was deserted by the Romans, have been incessantly suffering prostration by the hand of nature. The feeble roots of grasses, ferns, and shrubs, have been assisted by the more destructive wedges and levers of forest trees in levelling it with the ground; and, in many places in the west of this county, for considerable distances together, the ruins that time has thrown from its brow, lie in a deep green mound at its feet; and thorns, briars, hazel, and mountain ash (entwined with relentless ivy), are still, in the parts that remain above ground, at the labour of demolition in which, for the last fourteen centuries, they have been unceasingly engaged.