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directed to a broken slab in which was represented, very spiritedly, a combat 
between an English mastiff and some wild animal ; and also to two inscriptions in 
which the name of Geta (the younger son of Severus) had been mutilated and 
partly effaced, bearing evidence to the hatred in which he was held by his brother 
Caracalla, and confirming in a remarkable way the truth of written history, and 
the still wider truth that ‘‘ the evil which men do lives after them.” The contents 
of the museum enabled the Club to realize very vividly the former importance of 
Caerleon, as well as to view with interest the traces of a Roman villa which Dr. 
Woollett had discovered in his garden. His grounds include also a lofty mound, 
clearly of artificial origin, which may have supported 
‘ The giant tower 
From whose high crest they say, 
Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset. 
Or, perhaps, the more substantial keep which in historic times was attached to the 
extensive castle mentioned in Domesday. The point is one which we cannot now 
determine. Suffice it to say the view from its summit amply rewarded those who 
made the ascent and the exertion of climbing rendered them better able to do jus- 
tice to the good fare which awaited them at the Priory. After a dinner which 
must have taxed the skill and the resources of the monastic cook to provide, our 
genial host—Mr Lee.—read to the Club a very interesting paper, which, with its 
accompanying illustrations, will form a prominent feature in the next volume of 
our transactions. Throughout the day—which in the memory of your President is 
marked with a white stone—there were frequent allusions to King Arthur, and the 
connection of this place with our great hero of Romance. It was thither, so some 
say, that ‘‘ the blameless king” came at Pentecost to be crowned and held high 
festival with chieftains from Lothian and Orkney, from Gower and Carados. 
There, too, if we accept the Laureate’s version, the Prince Geraint brought his fair 
bride Enid, and 
By the hands of Dubric, the high saint, 
They twain were wedded with all ceremony. 
The incredulity of modern times has boldly pronounced Arthur to be a myth and his 
whole history a fable, and it must be confessed that as yet neither Mr. Lee nor any 
one else has done for Caerleon what Dr. Schliemann has been doing for Troy— 
exhumed the splendid palaces which, as Geoffrey of Monmouth says ‘‘ once emula- 
ted with their gilded roofs the grandeur of Rome.” Yet I cannot but believe that 
beneath the Arthurian romance as well as below the Homeric epic there is a 
substratum of truth, although in both instances by a natural process of develop- 
ment a simple story has become complex, and incidents and characters widely 
separated in time and place have been rashly joined together. We see this 
especially in the legend of King Arthur—a Kymric hero, but not one of the 
Kymry of Wales, unless we adopt the latest hypothesis and believe that all the 
Kymry were immigrants from Armorica. Anyhow, we cannot doubt that the 
nucleus of the romance was derived from Brittany. From that country it passed 
across the channel to Cornwall, where most of its scenes are laid by the earliest 
chronicles, and so through Devonshire it came to Somerset—its next important 
