246 ROMAN PAVEMENTS. 



In writing the above, I have followed the older antiquaries and 

 lexicographers, and have spelled tesselated with one 1. Whether 

 they did so because they called the components of a Mosaic 

 tesserce or dice, rather than tesseltce, square plates or slabs, and 

 because having an eye on the mutables r and 1, they chose to 

 regard tesselated with one 1 as equivalent to tesserated, given in 

 Bailey's Dictionary 1727, or as a contraction of tesserulated ; or 

 whether the word with one 1 had somehow become naturalised, 

 I know not. But I will name some works in which the single-1 

 spelling is used without alternative : 



Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776. 

 Parker's Glossary of Architecture, 1845. 

 Westropp's Handbook of Archaeology, 1867. 

 Mollett's Dictionary of Art and Archaeology, 1883. 

 Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities, in 



an article over the signature of James Yates, M.A., 



F.R.S., 1842. 



and, most significant of all, 



Skeat's Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 



1882. 



And I will point out further that the scholarly translators of 

 classical Latin writers follow the same practice. Thus Pliny's 

 words, " Similiter fmnt opicata testacea," are rendered by 

 Bostock and Riley. "Wheat-ear [herring-bone] tesselated 

 [one 1] pavements are similarly done." And Suetonius's words, 

 already cited, " Tessellata pavimenta," with two 1's, are given by 

 Thomson and Forester, his translators, as ''tesselated pave- 

 ments," with one 1. 



And I venture to remind those pedants who would drive us 

 back to a spelling satirised byLucilius that, at any rate for them, 

 these cuboids of stone must be no longer tesserae, but tessellae ; 

 they must say, not this tessera is white or black, but this 

 tessella. 



