another frontier of the same
great government; beyond it lay the horizons unknown, and it barred
out the sea.

But how much older than Rome are the South Downs! Doubtless before the
foundation of Rome, e'er Troy was besieged, these hills stood up
against the south and served us as a habitation and a home. Nor indeed
have we failed to leave signs of our life there so many thousand years
ago, so that to-day a man wandering over that great uplifted plateau
which slopes so gradually towards the sea, though he seem to be
utterly alone, as far as possible from the ways and the habitations of
men, immersed in an immemorial silence, in truth passes only from
forgotten city to forgotten city, amid the strongholds and the burial
places of a civilisation so old that it is only the earth itself which
retains any record or memory of it. Here were our cities when we
feared the beast, before we had knowledge of bronze or iron, when our
tool and our weapon was the flint.

The man, our ancestor, who chipped and prepared the flints for our use
at Cissbury for instance, doubtless looked out upon a landscape
different from that we see to-day and yet essentially the same after all.
The South Downs in their whole extent slope, as I have said, very
gradually seaward and south, and there of old were our cities chiefly set,
but northward their escarpment is extraordinarily steep, rising from time
to time into lofty headlands of which the noblest, the most typical and
the most famous is Chanctonbury. Standing above that steep escarpment a
man to-day looks all across the fruitful Weald till far off he sees the
long line of the North Downs running as it were parallel with these
southern hills, and ennobled and broken by similar heights as that of
Leith Hill. Between, like an uneven river bed with its drifts and
islands of soil, running from west to east, lies the Weald, opening at
last as it were into the broad estuary of Romney Marsh, half lost in
the sea. And what we see to-day our neolithic forefathers saw too--with
a difference. Doubtless the Downs then were as smooth and bare as they
are now, but the Weald, we may be sure, was different, wilder and
certainly fuller of woodland, though never perhaps the vast and
impenetrable forest of trees of which we have been told.

I say that the Downs, now deserted save by the shepherd and his flock,
were of old populous, and of this fact the evidence is plentiful. There
is indeed not one of the five m