There is scarcely a district in the world endowed with such singular beauty, and possessing such deep points of interest, as that extending about ten or twelve miles westward from Naples. A sky of such brilliancy as only Italy can shew; a sea of colours like the transparent hues of the sapphire and emerald; mountains on land and mountainous islands rising from the sea twice and thrice the height of those in Wales, and crowned with snow for a third of the year. The air of extraordinary clearness and purity, and redolent with the odours of the myrtle, orange, and citron. The earth covered with rich crops of maize, the vine hanging in a cordage of festoons from tree to tree, huge groves of figs and olives twisted in every fantastic form, and interspersed with the feathery palm, forests of pine, leccio, and cypress, all form a scene of beauty difficult to describe. But how is the interest heightened when we reflect on the history of the spot! We are in the scene so exquisitely described by Virgil in the Æneid. Here are the Isles of the Sirens and of Circe, the Tomb of Misenus, the Grotto of the Sibyl, the mysterious River Cocytus, the Lake Avernus, and the Elysian Fields. Here, too, the great poet is supposed to have been interred. The heights are crowned with the remains of sumptuous villas, where Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Lucullus, and Augustus feasted, and where Cicero penned his best philosophical works.

Among the MSS. which once belonged to Samuel Jeake, the well-known editor of the Charters of the Cinque Ports, now in the possession of Morton Frewen, Esq. are 190 letters written in the years 1664 to 1674 to Mr. Philip Fryth, a solicitor at Rye, and a few to Mr. Samuel Jeake, by Mr. John Allin, sealed with the device of a pelican and its young, or the death's head and cross bones, or the arms, a chevron between three talbot's or leopard's heads, and the crest a talbot's or leopard's head. Many of these letters relate to the last grievous visitation of London by the Plague (the history of which De Foe compiled). They are very interesting, and I am enabled, by the kindness of T. W. W. Smart, Esq., M.D., to lay extracts before our Society in continuation of the paper of Mr. Samuel Pegge, in the sixth volume of the Archæologia.

I have great pleasure in furnishing you with some remarks on the four Deeds, with seals, of the time of Henry VI., which you propose to lay before the Society, and also with a brief memoir of Sir William Oldhalle, whose seals are appended to those documents. A subject, that has interested me so much, may not be without interest to others.

Now that the public attention is so much directed upon the Tower at Westminster which is to receive the great clock and bell which are to proclaim the hour to the whole population of London, it appears not unseasonable to draw into notice the ancient and long-lost Bell-Tower which formed part of the buildings of the ancient Palace of Westminster, and stood very near to the site of the more splendid and imposing Tower recently erected.

The communication which I desire to make to the Society on the present occasion will be found to be in some respects peculiarly unsatisfactory. It is a tale of an interesting manuscript, imperfect; of inquiries respecting it, unavailing; of researches, baffled on every hand; and now of an ultimate appeal to this Society, in the hope that some Member may supply the deficiencies which I have not been able to remove.

Our zealous Stuttgart correspondent, Captain von Dürrich, to whom we owe the discovery of the Oberflacht remains, perhaps the most important of their class, has favoured me with a brief communication respecting some ancient and obscure Suabian tumuli. This I have endeavoured to embody in the following notice, which I would venture to hope may interest our Society. Captain von Dürrich's letter is accompanied by illustrative drawings, now exhibited.

Dans le courant du mois de Mars, 1856, j'ai commencé une seconde fouille archéologique dans le cimetière abandonné de l'ancienne église de Bouteilles près Dieppe. Le but de ma tentative nouvelle était encore la recherche de cercueils de pierre et de croix en plomb avec formule d'absolution. Cette fois j'ai trouvé deux croix et six tombeaux.

In a communication by Mr. Stone, read to the Society of Antiquaries in the last session, the writer alluded to the appearance of a number of circles, heretofore looked upon by the country people as “Fairy Rings,” which had been observed by him among the corn. As the summer advanced, additional circles became visible, and finally the number which could be distinctly traced amounted to thirteen.

That excellent scholar the lamented Kemble has pointed out the correspondence which exists between the mortuary urns of our ancestors, the borderers on the Elbe and the Eider, and many of our own. The same correspondence may be expected to be found in the institutions we have in common, and I now beg to submit to the Society of Antiquaries some account of probably the most striking example of the old Mark Confederation, the foundation of our elective institutions. In the republican community of Ditmarsh—which existed till the promulgation of the new Danish Code of Laws in 1554—we may see the germ of our power of self-government and of our jury system. Their system of house-marks was certainly once in use amongst our own yeomen, although now nearly obsolete; a system which throws, I think, considerable light on the papers on the Hide of Land and certain Manorial Customs, which, through your encouragement, I submitted to the Society, and which are printed in Volumes XXXIII. and XXXV. of the Archæologia.

Nicholas, the son of Robert Breakspear, was born early in the twelfth century at Langley Abbot's, in Hertfordshire.

His father appears to have been a younger son of a family deriving its name from a place situated in the adjoining parish of St. Michael; but was so indigent as to have had recourse to mendicant habits, in which his child probably participated. Upon the death of his wife, Robert Breakspear became first a lay-brother, and then a monk, of the adjacent Abbey of St. Alban's, leaving his young son to provide for himself. Nicholas, thus deserted, very naturally hung about the monastery of which his father was an inmate, waiting among the crowd assembled at its gate for the daily distribution of its broken victuals, and occasionally being employed in fulfilling some of the menial offices of the establishment.

While engaged in my recent perambulation of the forest of Wychwood, I paid a visit to Stanlake, near Witney, the scene of Mr. Stone's researches, communicated by that gentleman to the Society in the last session. On that occasion Mr. Stone informed me of the discovery of Anglo-Saxon remains in the adjoining village of Brighthampton. His account is as follows:—

“On the 24th June, 1857, as some workmen were employed on the site of the old malthouse at Brighthampton, which has been recently removed, they discovered, immediately beneath the floor, a grave containing the remains of a child, lying east and west, the head to the west. There were found with the remains beads of amber and of glass, a small brass-bound bucket, the staves of which, being of wood, had perished, a small knife, a pair of fibulæ of bronze gilt, and some unknown fragments in bronze.”

Prior to the fifteenth century, Spain being constituted by a number of small independent states, their interests clashed with each other, and serious feuds became the natural consequence. When reduced, however, to one common rule, belonging to one nation, discovery and conquest followed, and its domestic institutions, together with the character of its literature, improved. It is to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that this beneficial consolidation and completion is to be ascribed. The states into which Spain in the beginning of the fifteenth century was arranged, consisted of Castille, Aragon, Navarre, and Granada. These at length were included within one monarchy, and Castille became the capital of the kingdom.

La sépulture chrétienne du xie au xvie siècle est encore peu connue. Son histoire ne saurait guère être établie qu'à l'aide de documents liturgiques et archéologiques. Déjà l'archéologie sacrée a étudié avec un louable zèle les monuments qui recouvrent le sol; mais ceux que la terre cache dans son sein sont encore inexplorés. Pour un grand nombre de ces documents une difficulté insurmontable se présente. Consacrés par l'usage et par la religion, les asiles qui les recèlent sont inviolables et inaccessibles même pour la science, sauf le cas de travaux publics.

It is the especial province of the antiquary to collect and arrange, under one view, the scattered notices to be found in old writers, and to illustrate those notices by comparing them with the monuments which time has spared, and the usages which yet linger among us. By such means, passages in history, which are, in themselves, purely incidental and subordinate, are made to bear their share in the illustration of past ages, and thus to afford occasional glimpses of the manners and customs of the generations that have preceded us.

The attention of the Council of the Society of Antiquaries having been directed to the recent Act of Parliament for the disafforesting of the royal forest of Wychwood, it was deemed right that some account of its ancient and recently existing state should be placed on record: I accordingly proceeded in the autumn of the past year to make a personal survey of this well-known yet but little explored district,—a district which in old times extended, north and south, from the woody upland of Charlbury and Ditchley to the green meadows of Witney and Cogges; and east and west, from the stream known as the Glyme, near Woodstock, to the borders of Gloucestershire.

On September 8th, 1856, I commenced my seventh, and last, archæological research in the remarkable cemetery of Envermeu, which, since its first discovery in 1850, has been the means of revealing to me nearly the whole of Merovingian archæology. On the 10th I visited the ground to examine the trenches which the workmen had prepared, and, on the same day, I examined seven interments, the first of which proved to be the most interesting of all my discoveries of this season.

In the month of July last, while engaged in some antiquarian inquiries on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, I accidentally heard of the discovery of sepulchral remains in the village of Kemble. Convinced from the account I then received, that these relics were of the Anglo-Saxon period, I lost no time in proceeding to Kemble, where I obtained abundant proof of the discovery, and a sufficient description of the objects discovered, to satisfy me that my conjectures were well founded.

There are three questions of an antiquarian character connected with the so-called Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli, which may be important in discussions relating to the geological phenomena exhibited by that celebrated building. These are:—

1st. Was it a temple of Serapis

2nd. Its probable age?

3rd. Can any light be thrown upon its history, or on the dates of the various changes of level?

The title which has just been read to you will shew that it is not my intention to enter into the inquiry which has been so learnedly conducted by others, into the various substances which have been used for the purposes of writing, and the times when one substance became superseded by another which was found more suitable to the purpose.

There is scarcely anything more perplexing to the architect in building churches in the revived medieval style than the treatment of the chancel. If he knows anything of, or has any feeling for, Gothic art, he must know how bad, in every point of view, a small or short chancel is. Very few ancient examples are less than one-third of the total length of the building, while in very many the chancel is quite as long as the nave. If the architect follows these proportions, and complies with a notion which has been lately promulgated, and which we shall presently have to examine, that the laity should not be allowed to enter the chancel, then he is told that he has built a church one-third of which is useless; that a large portion of the service is read at such a distance that people cannot hear, and that he has wasted money simply to get a good external effect.