RIOARDUS CORINENSIS. 179 



to the fashion of that age. Hence his reputation was extended far and 

 wide, as one foremost among the antiquarian authorities of his day. 



But Stukeley's day was one in which antiquarian zeal was little tem- 

 pered by critical judgment. The historian Gibbon, while turning to 

 account his " Medallic History of Marcus Aurelius Valerius Carausius, 

 Emperor of Britain,'' adds in a note : " I have used his materials, and 

 rejected most of his fanciful conjectures." Few writers have more 

 widely differed in every mental characteristic, than the calm, philoso- 

 phic, sceptical historian of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman 

 Empire/' and the fanciful, credulous, but enthusiastic author of the 

 " Itinerarium Curiosum." He visited Oxford, in September, 1724, 

 and one of its fellows, Thomas Hearne, has recorded the fact in 

 his Diary, with this comment on his brother antiquary: ''This 

 Dr. Stukeley is a mighty conceited man, and it is observed by all I 

 talked with that what he does hath no manner of likeness to the origi- 

 nals. He goes all by fancy. .... In short, as he addicts himself to 

 fancy altogether, what he does must have no regard among judicious 

 and truly ingenuous men." A biographer in the " Penny Cyclopaedia" 

 sums up his character in this fashion : " No antiquarian ever had so 

 lively, not to say licentious a fancy as Stukeley. The idea of the 

 obscure, remote past, inflamed him like a passion. Most even of his 

 descriptions are rather visions than sober relations of what would be 

 perceived by an ordinary eye ; and never, before or since, were such 

 broad continuous webs of speculation woven out of little more than 

 moonshine." An amiable enthusiast himself, he was well fitted to 

 maintain in friendly cooperation the fellowship of antiquaries who, in 

 that eighteenth century, set themselves to work, with characteristic 

 enthusiasm,' on coins, medals, seals, ancient monuments, records, rolls, 

 genealogies, and manuscripts of all sorts ; and was specially noticeable 

 among the antiquarian fraternity, as one to whom a novice in the craft 

 might turn for sympathy, without much danger of being troubled by 

 critical doubts or questionings as to the genuineness of any plausible 

 antique submitted to him. He was accordingly selected, in due time, 

 as the confidant of an antiquarian discoverer, of a type peculiar to that 

 eighteenth century ; and has since owed his chief fame to the part he 

 bore in the marvellous literary disclosure. 



In the year 1743, in which Dr. Stukeley published his learned folio 

 on "Abury, a Temple of the British Druids," the Princess Louisa, 

 youngest daughter of Greorge II., was married, at the age of nineteen, 



