i9i4 _I 9 I 5-] Hadrians Wall. 1 5 1 



presence at Corstorpituni by an inscription on a stone in a 

 building. 



The 2nd Legion was styled the Augustan, just as we 

 speak of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders or the 

 King's Own Scottish Borderers. An elaborate memorial of 

 the legion shows us also its badge— the sea-goat and the 

 winged horse. The badge of the 20 th Legion was a boar. 

 A stone on the Antonine Wall in Scotland records the 

 fact that a vexillation of the 20th Legion, styled the Valiant 

 and Victorious, erected 4411 paces of that wall. One object, 

 exhumed at Corstorpitum, the excavators at once named 

 ' Harry Lauder.' There is some suggestion that it represents 

 a god. That is not very complimentary to the gods. It really is 

 a somewhat ' broad ' presentation of a soldier of the auxiliary 

 forces. It is a mould for the casting of relief figures for the 

 ornamentation of some article of pottery perhaps, and may 

 have been a Eoman representation of these grotesque figures 

 so common nowadays. 



Of course innumerable portions of arms and tools have been 

 found, but I do not trouble you with a description of them, 

 for in no case do these approach in perfection of preservation 

 the collection from Newstead in our own National Museum of 

 Antiquities in Queen Street. One cannot but notice that few 

 of the remains have been more than two or three feet high. 

 Have all the upper parts absolutely disappeared ? By no 

 means. The Eoman Wall is as much alive to-day as it was 

 sixteen centuries ago, but it must be sought under a variety of 

 disguises. We are often consumed with rage and contempt 

 for those sordid creatures who had the heart to destroy our 

 mediseval abbeys and castles to build their houses and farm- 

 steadings with, but that rage and contempt is modified in the 

 breast of the pilgrim of the wall when he recognises where 

 the builders of the abbeys and castles of Northumberland got 

 their material. Lanercost Priory is one of the most beautiful 

 of these buildings. I am exposing its evil deeds when I say 

 that all the stones of the beautiful North Transept and many 

 other parts are Eoman stones. Think of it ! These stones, 

 amid which resounded for centuries the Aves and the Pater- 

 nosters, had echoed the Latin tongue when it was a living 

 language and when it was used to the praise of other gods. 



