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Everyone at some time or other visits St. Michael's Mount, and a mass of literature good, bad, and indifferent has been written on the historic pile. I should only weary my readers by adding to the mass.

"Years since, I climb'd Saint Michael

His Mount:-you'll all go there
Of course, and those who like'll
Sit in Saint Michael's Chair:

For there I saw, within a frame,
The pen-O heavens! the pen-
With which a Duke had sign'd his name,

And other gentlemen.'

"1

In such light style does the great satirical poet of the Victorian era hit off, if not the salient features of St. Michael's Mount, at any rate the characteristics of most of the visitors thereto.

1 "Precious Stones" in Fly Leaves, C. S. Calverley.

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CHAPTER XXII

ROMANS IN CORNWALL

THERE is singularly little evidence of any real Roman occupation of Cornwall. In other counties of England, where it is known the Romans actively ruled, villas, camps, roads, stone coffins, tessellated pavements, and baths, etc., are found. Not so in Cornwall. Roman roads in Cornwall

are conspicuous by their absence, and it is well known that the first duty of a Roman general on conquering a country was to make straight roads for the passage of troops. That there passed a road west of Exeter to Totnes we learn from Robert of Gloster (time of Henry III), when speaking of the four great Roman roads. There is also some slight evidence that a road ran as far as the River Fal, but we have no proof that any regular Roman road ran to Land's End. Indeed, I find Carew (1602) noticing the absence of Roman roads in Cornwall: "for highways, the Romans did not extend theirs so far."

Most likely the Roman galleys put into the ports of Penwith, and the Damnonii submitted to the invading legions without a contest, purchasing peace by a tribute, paid perhaps in tin ingots, while the officers, viewing the rugged nature of the coast, were not sufficiently attracted by the scenery to care to reside there.

Scenery, beautiful landscapes and seascapes in the simple, exquisite reality of nature, had little or no influence on the military-trained minds of the Romans. They certainly understood art, admired sculpture and cultivated sculptors. That was because they had an appreciation of art, not nature. Many a person in these days, too, loves to wander through picture gallery after picture gallery; will spend days and days walking miles amid the pictures of Antwerp, Florence, Dresden, Bruges, Madrid, and Rome, who would be absolutely bored by sitting quietly down

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and taking in day after day the beauties of the Land's End, or the subtleties of the lights and shades as they play upon the Lizard. In none of the old classical writers do you find expressed that keen delight in the beauties of nature which is so associated with modern poets. The Romans of old, especially these soldiers who were sent to conquer distant lands, had no time for such frivolities. They would not possibly have called them frivolities, for they were very serious in all their undertakings. They simply did not recognise the beauties around them; they merely did not see them at all. The Seasons of the famous Arch of Trajan (114 B.C.) at Benevento are represented by nude boys. Even when a landscape is attempted to be portrayed on that wonderful monument of Roman sculpture, nowhere does it for one moment detract from the predominance of the human interest. "So consistently is the scheme carried out that the spectator accepts the strange compromise without the slightest effort of imagination, and becomes entirely accustomed to a toy architecture and landscape among which men, move, build, march, and dieoffer stupendous sacrifices or receive extensive embassies -like so many Gullivers in a land of Lilliput.”1

The Roman villas (the remains of which we find in this country) are placed in by no means the most beautiful positions. They were built in spots where few in a similar position in the social scale in these days would choose to build a house. Then, too, these Romans who invaded England had come from a very beautiful country-a country abounding in every variety of grand, gorgeously coloured, sublime scenery, so that when they arrived at our rocky shoresespecially Cornwall-they were not enraptured at all at the sight. In our own day thousands and thousands of our countrymen go to Italy to enjoy the scenery there, and thousands upon thousands more would do so had they the means for travelling.

So there is no need for surprise in the knowledge that the Romans did not settle in Penwith.

Perhaps, as Mr. Lach-Szyrma says, some unfortunate centurion may occasionally have been sent here for banishment, "but of evidences of Roman civilisation, so common

1 Roman Sculpture, by Mrs. Arthur Strong, LL. D., 1907.

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in other parts of England, in Penwith we have next to none."

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That being so, it is at first sight strange to learn that an immense number of Roman coins have been found in Cornwall, and particularly Penwith. Borlase in his Antiquities of Cornwall (1769) gives several instances. In the sides of Karn-brê Hill, a Mr. Bevan, of Redruth, discovered in 1749, three feet under the surface, the quantity of one pint of copper Roman coins; and a few years before a Mr. Stephens, of the same town, came upon a quart of old coins of the same nation in the same place. At Tredine (Treryn), the south-west point of Cornwall, there was found," says Leland, " in hominum memoria, digging for the fox, a brass pot full of Roman money." On an arm of the sea called "Helford Haven, in the tenement of Condorah, in the spring of the year 1785, were found twenty-four gallons of the Roman brass money," of the age of Constantine and his family. In 1747, about two miles below the seaport of Truro, on a branch of the Falmouth Harbour, in a ditch near Mopas Passage, were found twenty pounds weight of Roman brass coins, most of which were from Gallienus, who began his reign A.D. 259, to Carinus, who with Carus and Numerian reigned about two years, from 282 to 284. In 1807 no less than three hundred coins of Gallienus, Postumus, Victorinus, and Tetricus were found near the Land's End.

Borlase thinks that these finds of large heaps of coins point to them as being part of the military chests of those days. "It being absurd to imagine that even merchants or misers would lay up such a heap of copper farthings (if I may call them so), or carry them from place to place to traffick withal, or that any but the Romans could have such a quantity in their possession for the payment of soldiers." From the small value of these coins, and their worn state, Mr. Lach-Szyrma suggests, on the other hand, that they might be miners' wages, or remains of Roman countinghouses.

But be that as it may, the curious question remains, why did the owners of these masses of coins bury them? Odd coins, which have been found all over Cornwall, can easily be accounted for-they may have been accidentally

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dropped or lost. But when you come to gallons found together, as at Mopas and Condorah, the solution is not so simple and is worth considering. The solutions which have been advanced are interesting, as showing, at any rate, the truly wonderful resources of antiquaries. Some have suggested that the Romans buried their money in order to perpetuate their glory and the memory of their conquests-in other words, to make themselves poor that they might benefit some future finders.

Mr. Speed thought that the Romans buried their money when they took their last farewell of the country-an explanation I venture to think equally unsatisfactory. It is also probable that in those troublous times copper, brass, and bulky coins were hurriedly buried in the confusion arising from sudden attacks, plunderings of camps, and even war alarms. The gold and silver coins would naturally be secreted about the person and so are never found in bulk. Maybe the Roman commanders, when returning home, thought it not worth while to take back the bulky coins to Rome, as they could get plenty more struck off there to pay the soldiers, and so buried those they had left over before leaving England. Among the inhabitants here they would have been of no use as currency, as they were not negotiable. Such are some of the explanations for these curious finds, and there may be others which I know not of. In all probability these burials of coins in bulk may have been due to more than one cause. There is one very Roman-looking antiquity in Cornwall, and that is the Plan-an-Guâre, or amphitheatre, which seems to me, at any rate, to owe something to the influence of the Romans, an example of which is, as we have seen, at St. Just.

If it be true that clotted cream is made nowhere in the world but in Cornwall, Devon, and Phoenicia, the fact is significant-pointing to early intercourse between the Cassiterides and the natives of Tyre and Sidon. It is more probable that the Phoenicians brought the art of making this delectable delicacy to Cornwall when they came to trade for tin. That Brittany, however, has also the art of scalding cream might be expected, from the common Celtic origin of the two peoples. Devon, of course, borrowed the idea from Cornwall: such a delicacy could not long be