ALEXANDER GORDON, THE ANTIQUARY. 129 



have resisted the humanity which the Romans laboured to intro- 

 duce. As to the rest of Mr. Gordon's book, 



Ubi plura nitent — non ego paucis offendar maculis." 



Mr. Gale is less amiably inclined. He, it seems, has been particeps 

 criminis, having been seduced into favouring and aiding in the 

 publication of the letters, under the belief that it was done with the 

 Baron's approval. After all, perhaps, we may attach too much 

 importance to the coy pair of dilettanti, who did not very bitterly. 

 resent the publication of the learned prelections of two such " honours 

 of their age and country," if only the printers and proof readers had 

 presented them to the public eye in more faidtless form. The 

 purposed printing of a supplement by Gordon, to his folio, was 

 andoubtedly known to his correspondents, for Mr. Gale, in writing 

 CO the Baron about a Roman inscription rescued from the crypt 

 under Hexham Church, in IsTorthumberland, tells him that Gordon 

 designs to publish another inscription, one of Septimius Severus, in 

 his Appendix. 



Some of the learned speculations of Gordon's correspondents, 

 which they had no objection then to communicate to the London 

 Antiquarian fraternity, and to the world at large— so far as any- 

 body outside of that learned fellowship troubled himself about such 

 matters, — read oddly enough to us now. Gordon's Itinerary must 

 have been passing through the press when Mr. Gale wrote to Bai'on 

 Clerk, telling him of one of his letters, that it was received by "our 

 Society with all the applause due to its merit : that is the greatest. 

 I have their commands to desire your acceptance of their thanks for 

 those just observations made by you on the ancient ways of sepulture 

 used by our ancestors, and to beg your leave that they may be 

 inserted into their Archives." But the Society of Antiquaries had 

 not yet begun the publication of their " Archasologia, or Miscella- 

 neous Tracts relating to Antiquity," and indeed did not do so for 

 nearly half a century thereafter ; so that, but for Gordon's zeal to 

 supplement his own researches with the speculations of his learned 

 patrons, their illumination of the obscurities of an ancient past 

 would have been to as little purpose as the lighting of the "Perpetual 

 Lamp," which the Baron desciibes to have been dug up under a cairn 

 in his own neighbourhood. Such lamps, he goes on to say, were lighted 

 and placed by the ancients in- their urns ; and, if some people are 

 to be believed, " Upon the opening of an ancient sepulchre, light has 



