ALEXANDER GORDON, THE ANTIQUARY. IS 



and vast as ever ;" and lie adds that recent excavations " show ns that 

 when they are continued throughout the entire station, the ancient 

 Borcovicus will be the Pompeii of Britain." 



Such was the encouragement which stimulated Gordon to carry 

 out his persevering researches, and embody the results in the famous 

 Itinerariiim Sepfcentrionale. In this tall, thin, elaborately printed 

 folio, emphasised throughout with italics and capitals of various 

 type, the author records with loving minuteness his discoveries 

 and observations relative to coins and medals, altars, inscribed 

 tablets, and other memorials of the past, and his careful surveys and 

 measurements of every station, camp, wall, fort, or military way 

 ascribable to the Romans, in any part of Scotland or the neighbouring 

 districts of Northumberland and Cumberland. The monuments now 

 familiar as " The Sculptured Stones of Scotland," and assigned with 

 little hesitation to native Christian art, but in Gordon's day unhesi- 

 tatingly ascribed to the pagan Danes, also come under review, "with 

 other curious remains of antiquity never before commxmicated to the 

 public." He deals, indeed, with the whole subject of Scottish archte- 

 ology, as it was then understood, and embraces in his antiquarian 

 repertory everything, from the rudest stone axe or bronze celt, to 

 the Ruthwell Cross and other choice specimens of native art ; 

 though after the fashion of his day subordinating all else to what was 

 then deemed classic and Roman. In our own age of revived medi- 

 aeval tastes, we may indeed feel thankful that it was not then possible 

 to accomplish literally all that was implied in the author's wish 

 that " antiquity and learning may flourish in the island, to the total 

 extirpation of Gothicism, ignorance, and had taste." 



Gordon subsequently supplemented his Itinerarium with an ap- 

 pendix, chiefly enriched by means of a learned correspondence con- 

 cerning ancient sepulchral rites in Britain, carried on between his 

 own special friend and patron, Sir John Clerk, and Roger Gale, a 

 learned English antiquary, whose name is perpetuated, along with 

 that of his brother Samuel, in the Reliquioi Galeance of Nichol's 

 Bibliotheca Topogra'phica Britannica. They are pronounced by 

 Gordon to be " two gentlemen who are the honour of their age and 

 country." 



The part which " Sandy Gordon " and his Itinerarium Septentrio- 

 nale play, not only in one of the choicest of the Waverley Novels, 

 but in its autobiographic picturings of the great novelist himself, has, 



