ALEXANDER GORDON, THE ANTIQUARY. 136 



The date would make him considerably the senior of Gordon : but 

 this accords with other evidence which points to friendly relations 

 between the venerable knight whose numismatic labours supplement 

 Hickes' Thesaurus, and the Romano-Scottish Antiquary. Numis- 

 matics were not overlooked by the latter; and his Itinei'arium 

 includes a notice, with engravings, of the famous Anglo-Saxon Runic 

 Cross at Ruthwell, in Annandale, which he characteristically des- 

 cribes as "in form like the Egyptian obelisks at Rome." It is not 

 difficult, therefore, to imagine motives which tempted Gordon to 

 make his way, from time to time, to Richmond ; or to conceive of the 

 welcome he received from the old knight, as he produced some choice 

 coin or obscure inscription, over which the two could spend hours of 

 not less keen discussion than those of Sir Arthur Wardour and the 

 Antiquary par excellence^ either at Knockwinnock Castle, or in the 

 dining room of Monkbarns. In the account of Baupre Bell, another 

 learned numismatist and antiquary, given in the " Literary Anec- 

 dotes," Mr. Nichols . says, he made a cast of the profile of Dr, 

 Stukeley, prefixed to his " Itinerarium," and an elegant bust of 

 Alexander Gordon, after the original, given by him to Sir Andrew 

 Fountain's niece. 



In 1723, as we have seen, Gordon traversed the. lino of the old 

 Roman wall and military road between the Forth and the Clyde ; 

 and so was able "to show how the track, vestiges, and circumstances 

 of this wall of Antoninus Pius, commonly called Graham's Dike, 

 appear on the ground to this day, having taken an actual survey 

 thereof for that purpose, with a mathematical instrument, and 

 measured its track with a Gunter chain the whole way from sea to 

 sea." The fruits of this laborious survey, as he further tells us, he 

 had minutely elaborated in a great map of six large sheets, which he 

 designed very soon " to publish by itself, it being imj)ossible that 

 any book whatsoever should contain it." But this projected publica- 

 tion of the survey of a piece of military engineering which had 

 fallen into disuse for fully thirteen centuries, assumed ere long a 

 much more practical form. Sir John Clerk, writing on the 29 th of 

 August, 1726, to the English antiquary to whom he had then been 

 recently introduced by the author of the aforesaid survey, informs 

 him that Mr. Gordon is then expected in Edinburgh, " with his head 

 full of a project, to make a communication between Clyde and Forth 

 by a canal ; when I see it is probable he will be less fond of it, for 



