be understood by ourselves. We have not as yet realized how much was swept away and lost when, after two centuries of fighting, the Britons were driven to their mountains, with the loss of the old arts and learning. All over the country were the great houses, the stately villas, of a rich, cultured, and artistic class; all over the country were rich cities, filled with people who desired, and had, all the things that made life tolerable in Rome herself. The condition of Bordeaux in the fourth century, her schools, her professors, her poets, her orators, her lawyers, may suggest the condition of London, and in a less degree that of many smaller cities. If we bear these things in mind, I think we shall understand that the roads must have been everywhere crowded and thronged by the long processions of packhorses and mules engaged in supplying the various wants of this people, bringing food supplies to the cities, wines and foreign luxuries to the unwarlike people who were doomed before long to fall before the ruder and stronger folk of the Frisian speech. For our purpose it is sufficient to note that it was a country where the wants of the better sort created, by themselves, a vast trade; where, in addition, the exports were large and valuable; and where the traffic of the highways was very great and never-ending. In other words, this wild and desolate spot, chosen, we are told, as a fitting site for a monastery because of its remoteness and its seclusion, was, long before a monastery was built here, the scene of a continual procession of those who journeyed south and those who journeyed north. It was a halting-and resting-place for a stream of travelers who never stopped all the year around. By way of Thorney passed the merchants, with their hides bestowed upon their packhorses, going to embark them at Dover: London had not yet gathered in all the trade of the country. By way of Thorney they drove the long strings of slaves to be sold in Gaul. By way of Thorney passed the legions on their way north; craftsmen, traders, mimes, actors, musicians, dancers, jugglers, on their way to the towns of Glevum, Corinium, Eboracum, and the rest. Always, day after day, even night after night, there was the clamor of those who came and those who went: such a clamor as used to belong, for instance, to the courtyard of an old-fashioned inn, in and out of which there lumbered the loaded wagon, grinding heavily over the stones; the stage-coach, the post-chaise, the merchant’s rider on his nag--all with noise. The Isle of Bramble was like that courtyard: outside the Abbey it was a great inn, a halting-place, a bustling, noisy, frequented place; the center, before London, the mart of Britannia; no “Thebaid” at all; no quiet, secluded, desolate place, but the center of the traffic of the whole island. And it remained a busy place long after London Bridge was built, long after the Port of London had swallowed up all the other ports in the country. When the river, by