be a despot or nothing, and Cromwell, the vindicator of national rights, had to rule England without a Parliament by military force. They both confounded things which ought to be distinguished, and distinguished things which ought to be confounded. In an age of political philosophy the voice of the philosopher was unheeded.

It is, I am afraid, arguable that Selden was a lukewarm patriot. No man more thoroughly enjoyed that pleasure of looking down upon the errors of the vulgar which Lucretius has so magnificently described. Not that he had any ill-will to either party. He bore no malice, he harboured no feeling fiercer than contempt.

Non quia vexari quemquam est jucunda voluptas,

Sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.

There is a tradition, not authentic, that at the close of Selden's life he wished he had been a justice of the peace, and in that humble way useful to his neighbours. He would certainly have been the wisest justice on the banks of Trent, or Thames. Such wishes are not to be taken seriously. But Selden might have had a great career as a sagacious statesman, guiding the counsels and moderating the zeal of the Parliamentary party. He deliberately turned from what became in his eyes a vulgar broil. The great refusal' has never been made with more dignity. Selden retained the respect of his old colleagues, and his funeral in the Temple Church was attended by the judges of the land. He died, as he had lived, plain John Selden, while his intellectual inferiors filled high offices of State. He wanted a quiet life; he got it, and he paid for it. He has painted the situation in a quaint allegory:

Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. The lion, you know, called the sheep to ask her if his breath smelt; she said aye; he bit off her head for a fool. He called a wolf and asked him; he said no; he tore him in pieces for a flatterer. At last he called the fox and asked him. Truly he had got a cold and could not smell.

Selden's cold was chronic. During the period of these conversations the last civil war in England (except Monmouth's trumpery rebellion) was waged, Charles the First was executed, Oliver Cromwell became Protector of the realm. But to none of these events is there the smallest allusion in the talk of Selden's table. Such silence in private is amazing, and of course we do not know how much the secretary suppressed. But one can imagine that Selden, having definitively abandoned public life, would not care for such a pale simulacrum of it as talking politics with his friends. He had filled a great place, and there is nothing less dignified than a partial retirement; or it may be that men of very different opinions came to his house, and that to content them all he adopted a cleanlier shift than Sir Robert Walpole's by talking of universal truths. Posterity would be ungrateful to quarrel with the result. Except Bacon's Essays there is hardly so rich a treasure-house of worldly

wisdom in the English language as Selden's Table Talk. Some of it, indeed, is thoroughly Baconian, as Wit and wisdom differ; wit is upon the sudden turn, wisdom is in bringing about ends.' But most of it is entirely his own, the mature thought of a princely intellect equally at home in the book of the world and in the world of books. Johnson compared it with French collections of ana, such as the Menagiana, but it is intensely and characteristically English. Although he asks, Is there not enough to meddle withal upon the stage, or in love, or at the table, but religion?' religion was seldom out of his thoughts. He considered it as a statesman, not as a pietist, but he recognised its all-pervading influence on human affairs. An Erastian of the Erastians he was no materialist, like his friend Hobbes. He was indeed a typical Church of England man, as far removed from Geneva as from Rome. He did not shrink from the free handling of sacred subjects, and there was an element of brutality in some of his sledge-hammer attacks on current superstition. But if he had been the scoffing sceptic that some in fear of his learning dubbed him, so saintly a man as Sir Matthew Hale could not have called him a resolved, serious Christian. Coleridge complained of the lack of poetry in Selden, and this complaint is just. He was too much under the influence of reason, he had little or no imagination, and he underrated the force of sentiment, religious or otherwise. The ridiculous aspect of things struck him so forcibly that it sometimes blinded him to their graver significance. Every man has his limitations, and these were his. But those who know best what good talk is will be the readiest to admire the incomparable excellence of Selden's.

HERBERT PAUL.

EXCAVATIONS IN THE ROMAN FORUM

'HASTE MARTIÆ ET OPS CONSIVA'

IT is due to the initiative of Professor Guido Baccelli, Minister of Public Instruction, and to his solicitude for the scientific progress of Roman Archæology, that the present excavations in the Forum have been undertaken.

I am thus enabled to give the following account of the Sacraria of the Regia, and of the rites celebrated within its precincts, and to realise how the rulers of the ancient world, by subservience to the laws of nature, obtained strength to obey the laws of man.

Last year nothing was visible of the Regia but a few blocks of marble attributed to the reconstruction of 36 B.C., the surrounding earth not having been removed below the level of the pavement of the court in front of the temple of Vesta, and of the altar on the steps of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina. A vast and depressing layer of medieval paving stones, broken and furrowed in various fashions, represented the so-called Via Sacra, arbitrarily located between the temple of Vesta and the Regia, and recently saddled with a new drain brought thither across republican masonry at the angle of the Regia, cutting up a well of the second or third century B.C. full of votive offerings, and damaging a fine Etruscan structure-the front of the Temenos or sacred enclosure of the Vestals -once plastered with delicate opus albarium. The well referred to above is twenty feet deep, and contained ashes, cinders, EtruscoCampanian pottery with a black surface, architectural fragments and weights in terracotta, and an antefix representing Venus.

The presence of the votive offerings points to the well being considered sacred; while their date, as well as that of the structural formation of the tufa lining, would coincide with that of the Puteal Libonis, a 'fulguritum' of 195 B.C.

That the so-called Puteal Libonis must in future be looked upon as a purely medieval structure, probably a cattle trough, has been placed beyond all doubt by the fact that it overlaps a portion of one of the pedestals of the Arch of Augustus, and that a drain constructed in Imperial times passes beneath it.

Explorations have frequently been carried out in the Regia for

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the purpose of ascertaining the boundary and divisional walls. Mr. Nichols, some fifteen years ago, recognised the official residence, not the Domus Publica, of the Pontifex Maximus. Dr. Hülsen succeeded in excavating and identifying several architectural fragments belonging to a late restoration, among which was a portion of the cornice of the obtuse angle formed by the eastern side, where was the entrance, and the southern side opposite the temple of Vesta.

It was no secret that the Collegium of the Pontifices and Flamines served the purpose of a Record Office for Annals of State; that the consular and triumphal Fasti of the Romans were incised on its walls, and that within its precincts existed the sacraria of the Hasta Martiæ and of the goddess Ops Consiva; yet no trace of them had ever been found, or even sought for. The complete destruction of the building was attributed to the sixteenth century, and this sufficed.

Nothing is so injurious to archæological research as that indolence

of the brain which causes people, not only to accept for themselves as irrefutable canons, but to induce others, who have neither the means nor capacity to inquire for themselves, to place faith in opinions expressed in the first instance as provisional conjectures, and intended to be considered as such until justified by positive research. The preconception that the destruction of the Regia was accomplished in the sixteenth century, and the direction assigned to the Via Sacrain opposition to the statements of Varro-have retarded the solution of the problem and caused irreparable damage to the Regia itself.

Pirro Ligorio,' when referring to the discovery in 1546 of the marbles on which the Fasti were incised, states that as the excavations (conducted in search of building material for the construction of St. Peter's) approached the ground, part of the inscriptions were found in situ, and that, notwithstanding this, they continued removing them down to the foundation.

No account has been taken by modern archæologists of the assertion of Ligorio that the same destructive process had already been carried on in former times' (attributing perhaps to Vandalism that for which the Vandals were in no way responsible), nor of the statement of Panvinio in the Preface to the Fasti published in Venice in 1558, that a portion of the blocks composing the Regia had already been employed as steps in the churches, dispersed among private houses or reduced to lime previous to the excavations of 1546; and that the limekiln was not only discovered hard by, but that blocks of marble which had escaped the fire had already been sawn into slabs on which had been carved birds, flowers, Solomon's knots, and other barbarous ornamentations-utterly senseless-similar to those on the panels of pulpits and choirs in Roman Basilicas': Quum autem crypta ipsa, in qua lapides ipsi inventi fuerant, impensis Alexandri Farnesii cardinalis amplissimi, effoderetur, summo studio et diligentia cautum est, ut undequaque in circuitu longe lateque per cuniculos excavaretur, quo quicquid superesset temporum malignitati inveniri posset.

From his point of view, Panvinio could not have given a better description of the ecclesiastical sculptures of the eighth and ninth century, produced in a mediæval marble yard adjoining a limekiln at the entrance of the Roman Forum.

The fact that search was made far and wide by means of tunnelling for fragments broken off the Regia is in itself a proof that their dispersion had already been effected, not only previous to the excavations of the Renaissance, but before the Forum became filled with earth. With reference to the above I may here mention that among the pieces of marble considered to have formed the architectural decoration of the walls on which the Fasti were incised and enriched with exquisite chiselling of the Flavian age, I recognised a piece of a

1 Cod. Taurin. 15, 124.