By the Rev. Chr. Wordsworth, M.A. 207 



mutabilitie, and variation ; and her foot, looke you, is fixed upon a Sphericall 

 stone, which rowles, and rowles, and rowles ; in good truth, the Poet makes 

 a most excellent description of it: Fortune is an excellent morall." (K. 

 Henry V., act iii., sc. 6). 



SO the elegiac poem to Livia, on the death of Drusus, attributed to 

 Ovid, or to C. Pedo Albinovanus, lines 51-2, says that " Fortune 

 still rests unstable on a vvheel."^ It was said by the Eomans that 

 Fortuna had worn winged sandals, like Mercury ; but that when 

 she arrived in Eome, she loosed them, because she had come to stay. 

 (Plutarch, De Fortit. Bom. 4). The feet of our figure at Marlborough 

 rest on the ground, and are nearly covered by the robe. 



Judging from the dates of coins which he has so diligently and 

 successfully collected in large numbers at various places in the 

 Marlborough district, Mr. Joshua W. Brooke has inferred that 

 Eomans migrated from the Silbury or Avebury station to the 

 Mildenhall border of Marlborough ("Lower Cunetio," as some 

 antiquaries call it) about A.D. 300. They were settled also at 

 Folly Farm (styled by some authorities " Upper Cunetio ") until 

 they decamped, I suppose in 436. Mr. T. Codrington, in his 

 delightful manual, " Boman Boads in Britain" (S.P.C.K., 1903), 

 throws doubt upon the earthwork enclosing the parish church of 

 St. Mary (which Sir Eichard Colt Hoare called "Lower Cunetio") 

 being of Eoman origin (p. 330). 



As it is to be hoped that Mr. Brooke will put together in a 

 scientific shape the chronological outcome of the antiquarian finds 

 in each locality I will not indulge in conjectures which can have 

 but little value and might prove misleading rather than instructive. 

 But I venture to think that archaeologists who have seen Mr. 

 Bane's excellent photograph of the stone will agree with me that 

 we have in Marlborough, if not the site of a Eoman temple, at 

 least a vestige of pagan devotion coeval with their occupation of 

 this part of Wiltshire. 



' " Nempe per hos etiam Fortuna iniuria mores 

 Regnat, et incerta est hie quoque nixa rota," 



