2 
are said in inscriptions to be done by their decree. Their oihce 
was burdensome, as they had to raise the taxes and make good 
deficiencies. They could not sell their landed property without 
leave of the Government, and were subject to various arbitrary 
and vexatious restraints. The taxes became more oppressive in 
the decline of the imperial power, and the poverty of the middle 
classes •was one of the chief causes of the ultimate downfall of 
the empire. The evidence which was wanting in 1847 to prove 
that York had a municipal constitution. Time, the great 
revealer, has at length brought to light. The monument of 
M. Verecundus Diogenes ended its history as a horse trough for 
a public house in Hull. A. better fortune has awaited that 
before us, to rest secure in our Museum, along with the altars of 
gods and the memorials of emperors. 
April 1st.— The Rev. J. Kenrick read a paper, of which 
the following is an abstract, on the question—Who built the 
Roman Wall between the Tyne and the Solway?” He said. 
Notwithstanding the magnitude and importance of this work, 
antiquaries and historians have been much divided in opinion 
as to its builder. Magno se judice quisque tuetur.” Horsley 
differs from his predecessors ; Hodgson, Wellbeloved, and Bruce 
differ from Horsley; Merivale differs from them all. Dr. Bruce’s 
splendid volume, which is on the table, gives so complete a 
representation of the remains of the wall, that it may not be 
presumptuous, in one who has seen only a fragment of it, to offer 
an opinion on its age and builder. My inquiry will be confined 
to the walls ; the earthworks, which have been called respect¬ 
ively the agger and the vallum, having been raised either as 
limites, or as defences against attacks from the south, while the 
wall w^as evidently intended as a defence against the Caledonians. 
The historical evidence is somewhat ambiguous, in consequence 
of the loose way in which both Greek and Latin writers use the 
terms teichos, murus, and vallum. On the whole, however, it 
seems the true explanation of the words of Capitolinus, that 
Antoninus Pius, Hadrian’s successor, built ‘^another wall of turf 
across the isthmus between the Forth and the Clyde,” that 
Hadrian’s wall was also of turf. Of this wall of Antoninus there 
