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inhabitants of the kingdom. With his eastern route we are not 
concerned. His western road in all probability was from Carlisle 
through the territory of the Selgovee who occupied Dumfriesshire, 
and whose name is supposed to linger among us in that of the 
Solway Firth. 
The first station from Carlisle was at Netherby, and here perhaps, 
without any very great improbability, we may imagine, if we choose, 
with the Antiquary in Sir Walter Scott’s famous novel, Agricola 
himself to have been, and “ from this place,” as he said, ‘‘ we may 
suppose him to have looked forth.” You remember, I dare say, 
how—a warning and a caution to all future antiquarians—Sir 
Walter depicts the old gentleman waxing eloquent over a stone on 
which were engraved the magic letters A. D. L. L., which he 
interpreted to be “Agricola dicavit libens lubens,” and how on this 
foundation he raised a vast superstructure of Roman camps and 
campaigns, which he illustrated with great research and learning to 
his young companion. He had just fixed on the precise position 
of the preetorium, when he was rudely interrupted by the remark 
of the old beggar, destructive as the ponderous folio of the acutest 
critic, “ Praetorian here—Pretorian there ; I mind the bigging of 
it ;” who further proceeded to dash to pieces his ingenious rendering 
of the inscription by declaring it to be within his own knowledge 
that it stood for Aiken Drum’s Lang Ladle. The anecdote may 
warn us to leave the subject of Agricola. But whether he was 
here or not, so far as a Roman station is concerned we stand on 
surer ground ; and if we have no inscription that bears the name 
of Agricola himself, we have preserved for us a long series of 
inscriptions which conclusively prove that from his days onward 
throughout the whole period that they remained, the station here 
was occupied by troops, ; and that among those troops were some 
of the most distinguished legions that fought in Britain—the 2nd, 
the 6th, the 20th legion; the 1st cohort of the Spaniards; the 
cohors Nervana, which bore the name of the Emperor Nerva—all 
these were here, and all have left the traces of their presence. We 
have the monumental stone of a Rhetian lady—belonging to a 
people who lived in the modern district of the Tyrol—and who 
