I promised to send you some account of what remains of our English princes I was able to observe during my stay at Bourdeaux, in France, once the capital of the large dominions they possessed in that country; but you will soon perceive, how trifling and insignificant they are; pride and revenge having exercised all their fury against them. However, as I know the pleasure you take, and the indefatigable pains you have bestowed, in collecting and preserving whatever relates to any part of our English history, or antiquities, I shall make the less scruple of sending you them just as I found them.

Three years after the death of the learned John Battely, D. D. Archdeacon of Canterbury, there was printed in Latin, at Oxford, a beautiful little tract, intituled,“Antiquitates Ru- “tupinae,” or, the Antiquities of Richborough. It is an account of a conversation betwixt him and his two brother-chaplains to archbishop Sancroft, (the learned Dr. Henry Maurice, and Mr. Henry Wharton, vicar of Mynstere, in the isle of Tanet), in a very polite and elegant style.—Page 9, he tells them, that he undertakes to shew, that the antient port of Sandwich was bounded within the same limits which he ascribed to the port of Richborough, viz. Peperness to the east, and North-muth to the north.

Mr. Camden, speaking of Wetheral, in the county of Cumberland, says, “Here you see a sort of houses dug out of “a rock, that seem to have been designed for an absconding “place.” To which his learned annotator adds, “If not for “some hermite to lodge in, being near the Monastery.” These caves are in a rock of difficult access, and are two rooms one within another, each about five or fix yards square.

Mr. West communicated to the Society a fine printed copy of John Harding's Chronicle, formerly belonging to John Dee, the famous mathematician. On one of the covers is pasted an original writ of Privy Seal, dated anno 36 H. VI. direėct to William Wainfleet, Bishop of Winchester, then Chancellor, for making out Letters Patent under the Great Seal, granting to the said John Harding a yearly pension of 20l. for life, in consideration of his having recovered, at the great expence and hazard of his person, certain Letters Patent, and other Muniments, declarative of the right of sovereignty in the crown of England over that of Scotland. The words of the writ are:

Besechess fulle humblie your humble trew leige men, the maire, balifs, and comonalitie of your pouere citee of Wynchestre; that, whereas they have ben charged to bere the fee ferme of your said citee, whiche draweth yerlyee to the somme of an cxii marc; and bere also to the maister of the Hospitalle of Marie Maudelene beside Wynchestre lx s. also when the xv penny or taxe is graunted to your highnesse, it draweth to the somme of li l.. x s. iv d. withyne the said citee; the whiche, whenne it is levable, sum oon man in the said citee is sette unto iiii marc, and sum v marc, because your said citee is desolate of peple; also expens of Burges of the said citee comyng to your parlements, draweth to iiii s. by the daye; for the which said fee ferme so to be paid, your bailiffs have little or nought of certigntee to arayse it of, but oonly of casualtees, and yerelie lesen in payment of the said fee ferme xl l. or more; for which causes above said, and also for the grete charges and dayelie costes the which your said pouere citee berethe, abowte the enclosyng and meerage of your said citee, it is become right desolate, in so much as many notable parsons ben withdrawen out of the said citee for the causes above said.

Sir Phelim O'neal, and Sir Conn Macgennis, their generals then in Ulster, and major general Plunkett, who had been a soldier in foreign kingdoms, having enlisted and drawn together out of the counties of Ardmagh, Tyrone, Antrim, and Down, and other counties in Ulster, eight or nine thousand men, which were formed into eight regiments, and a troop of horse, with two field pieces; they did rendezvous, on the 27th of November, 1641, at and about a house belonging to Sir George Rawden at Brookhill, three miles distant from Lisnagarvy; in which town they knew there was a garrison of five companies newly raised, and the lord Conway's troops of horse.

In the parish register of Lisburn, in the county of Antrim, I found the foregoing account, &c. which not being taken notice of by any historian, I present the Society with a faithful copy of it, in the hand-writing of the Reverend Mr. Anthony Rogers, present rector of that parish.

About the end of July, 1732, in looking at the reparations of the cathedral of Narbonne, I observed an inscription to L. Aurelius Verus, on a great marble, whose back had been wrought into the ornaments of Gothic architecture, for the portal of the church; while the characters themselves stood inwards upon the mortar of the wall: but when the.portal was taken' down in order to be re-built, the Roman Letters, by purging off the lime, appeared distinctly in the following inscription, never yet published:

In the Strozzi collection at Rome, there is an Intaglio upon a Cornelian, of a Mercury, with his Caduceus in his left hand, while his right is raised towards his mouth in a very pensive attitude. Lord Essex bought the stone from the present D. Strozzi, the Pope's nephew, and Captain of his Guards, who is so extravagant and expensive in his pleasures, that he is thought to have sold some of the real antiques, and substituted copies by Costanzain their room, for which reason the Duchess his mother shows them in person. This stone was given to Sir Hugh Smithson (now his Grace the Duke of Northumberland) by Lord Essex; and from various circumstances appears to be the original itself, for which it was bought, upon the opinion of the best connoisseurs in Rome at that time. It must be owned, that Costanza copies antiques with great accuracy, as may be judged from one of his Medusas; but here the workmanship, considering the sweetness of the original, has a very different air from our Mercury, which is upon a stone round in the back, without much transparency, such as he never chuses for shewing his work; nor does the Greek word behind the figure seem to be modern: This is Antinooc, which shews the Mercury to be intended for Adrian's favourite.

The Trajan column at Rome is all of white marble, and consists of 30 stones; whereof 8 make the pedestal, 19 the pillar, and 3 the basis of the statue that.stands on the top.

The brass equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now in the area of the Capitol, was found in a vineyard, just by the Scala Santa, at Saint John's Lateran, where it lay neglected for many years upon the ground, till Pope Sixtus IV. (soon after the year 1470) set it upon a handsome marble pedestal, with an inscription, in the open place before the Lateran church; and there it remained till the Pontificate of Paul III. who, about 1538, caused it to be removed to the place where it now stands, on a pedestal adorned by the hand of Michael Angelo; the marble whereof it is made having been brought from the remains of Trajan's Forum. These particulars are related by Flaminius Vacca the sculptor; and he further adds, that as the statue was found in the ground belonging to the Lateran church, the members of the same went to law with the people of Rome about it; and he intimates, this suit was not determined in his time; but that he had heard the gentlemen of the church made a solemn demand of it in writing every year.

The measure of the walls of antient Rome is a point where-upon antiquaries have widely disagreed. The passage in Pliny's Nat. Hist. lib. iii. c. 5. to which they all refer, stands thus: “Moenia ejus collegere ambitu, Impp. Censs. que Vespasianis, anno conditae DCCCXXVI, passus XIII. M.CC.” Lipsius adds another x, and makes the circuit ten miles larger: but this insertion has, with very good reason, been rejected by the succeeding critics.

I have lately seen a collection of Drawings, without doubt, the finest in Europe, for the method and number of rare designs; nor is the price, considering the true value, at all too much. Mr. Envoy is of the same opinion, and has desired me to let an abstract of my catalogue, which I am making with all exactness, be copied out, to send to my Lord President. I send an abstract with this post, as I have done to Mr. Topham.

Mr. Wray informed the Society, that Mr. Mackinlay, in a letter to the Earl of Morton, dated Rome, January 9th, 1761, gives an account, that in September last, a Venus, of most exquisite workmanship, was dug up in the Mons Coelius, near the Clivus Scauri, at Rome. It is in the possession of the Marquis Carnovallia, who gave fifty scudi to the workmen, their full demand, on the half of the value, according to agreement; though it is worth some thousands. It is full six feet high, in the same attitude as the Venus of Medicis, with this difference, that she holds her right hand before her breast and her left supports a light drapery before.

—— And now, Sir, let me thank you for putting me upon looking into my history, “Anglia Judaica,” as I am so vain to call it. It gave me an opportunity of making, what I think a curious discovery, relating to a piece of Roman antiquity found in London. I happened to cast my eye on page the 4th, where mention is made of the Roman brick that was found about seventy years since in Mark Lane. You know very well that the Basso Relievo that is upon it has been thought, by all Antiquaries, to represent the story of “Sampson, and the foxes with firebrands.” Mr. Waller and others are of that opinion; and, to salve the matter, suppose the Jews were in Britain in the time of the Romans, and that they brought them acquainted with the story. As Mr. Waller was a man of note, I was obliged to take notice of his fancy, to prove the antiquity of the Jews in England; but declared I could not build much upon it at the time of my composing that page, but that the Basso Relievo related to Sampson.

As an enquiry into the original of any useful art practised in this kingdom seems to be one of the objects of our institution, I shall beg leave to lay before you some short remarks I have made on the antiquity of our Brick Building, which I am the rather induced to do, as it is a subject which has never been considered, as I know of, by any of our writers on architecture or antiquities.

As the workmen (May 4, 1756) were digging up part of the old foundation of the Black Swan Inn, in Holborn, they met with a stone, which was so strongly cemented with bricks, chalk, and other stones, like those they call ragg stones, that it was with great difficulty the pick-ax could make any impression, or separate them. This stone was at the bottom of a great pile of this rubbish, if I may so call it, and was about eighteen inches long, (but accidentally broke in the middle by some blow of the pick-ax) nine inches broad, and four inches thick, and thereon now stand these Arabic numerals cut into the stone, in the form and manner here described as near as I could imitate the same; some of which are about one inch ¾, and some about two inches tall; and under them there are the Roman numerals XII, the meaning of which, I will not at present even guess at.

Saint Peter's church in the East, Oxo˜n, was founded by Saint Grymbald, a Monk, about 814 years since, viz. anno Christi DCCCLXXXVI. according to the most credible account we find recorded in the annals of our English nation. This Saint Grymbald was a person of a sharp wit and immense knowledge, and therefore was by King Alfred (deservedly surnamed the Great, on a double respect, both for his noble atchievments in martial affairs, and his assiduous promotion of learning) elected one of the first professors of divinity in this most flourishing university of Oxon.

At Lord Pembroke's seat at Wilton, there is a very antient altar of Bacchus, of more consequence than vulgarly imagined. The inscription, which ends in a circle round it (for so Mr. Cowdry describes it, p. 116.) runs thus

There is a well-known and curious piece of gold in the Bodleian library, of which I must here take some notice, though it be not properly a coin. It has been no less than four times engraved; first by Dr. Plot, then in Camden, after that by Sir Andrew Fountaine, and lastly by Mr. Wise. And all the gentlemen concerned, to whom I may add Mr. Thwaites, have respectively given their opinions of it, but are so discordant among themselves, that there is indeed great room, and great occasion for a Moderator to compose differences between them, and, if one may be so happy, to give the true explication of it.