78 Stonehenge and its Barrows. 



The Incised Stone. 



Since the fact became known that the incision upon the lower 

 side of the impost of the trilithon which the Duke of Buckingham 

 helped to overthrow, was the work of an itinerant mechanic, all 



noticed that the small upright stones behind the altar were placed closer to each 

 other than in any other parts of the circle, and that a wider interval was left 

 at the entrance." Mr. Browne had his craze, which was that Stonehenge was of 

 the ante-diluvian period, and that the traces of the deluge were to be seen in 

 the direction in which the fallen stones are laid. The following account of him 

 was printed in a "Wiltshire newspaper : " Mr. Browne, the author of a work on 

 Stonehenge, was a man of limited means, but of respectable mental attainments, 

 ■who had been early struck with the magnificence of the remains on Salisbury 

 Plain, and had imbibed a passion for the temple at Stonehenge as absorbing and 

 as powerful as that felt by the young Parisienne for the Belvidere Apollo, or as 

 any one of the Pygmalion-like instances of which so many are recorded. To 

 this, and to its illustrative remains in this neighbourhood, all his thoughts were 

 devoted. He lived under its shadow, he dreamed of it, he endeavoured to trace 

 out the hidden mystery of its existence, he lectured upon its many wonders, 

 and he published a book about it. When engaged on his lectures to the 

 members of the literary institutions that existed some years since in Salis- 

 bury, he used to bring his drawings and make his arrangements in the 

 the morning, return to Amesbury to dinner, come back with more materials in 

 the afternoon, read his lecture in the evening, and then again walk on his 

 solitary road to A mesbury at night after the conclusion of the meeting, having 

 already walked five-and-twenty miles. But this persevering energy of his 

 character was more particularly exemplified during the construction of his 

 model of Stonehenge. Every stone was modelled on (he spot, aud the most 

 minute variations in the original carefully noted in his copy. Day after day, 

 and week after week, was he to be found among those memorials of old time — 

 planning, measuring, modelling, painting, in the prosecution of his self-pre- 

 scribed task, and interrupted only by theneeessity of sometimes visiting Salisbury 

 for materials, which he bore home himself, and on foot. The difficulty of 

 making siich a copy would not peihaps be great with proper assistance, but 

 this man worked wholly by himself, and we can imagine his self-gratulation on 

 the completion of bis labours, when he could exclaim, like the victor of Corioli, 

 * Alone I did it ! I ! ' From this model he made others on different scales, and 

 the moulds being preserved, these were afterwards sold by his son, together with 

 some of his own drawings equally accurate, to occasional visitors. 



" Mr. Browne, though he had completed his work, had not yet found for it a 

 resting-place, and he determined to present it to the British Museum. It was 

 accepted by the trustees, with thanks, and the author chose to have the pleasure 

 of placing it with his own hands in this great repository of the antiquities of 

 the world. Unwilling to trust the model from his sight, and equally unwilling 

 or unable to bear the expenses of the usual modes of travelling, he resolved to 

 walk with it to London ; and mounting his model on a wheel-barrow or hand- 



