removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here in
Downing Street, where you may study it very conveniently. It is not at
all a first-class specimen of its kind: not to be compared, for example,
with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring 35
feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, at
Stonesfield in Oxfordshire: but I take it as the handiest, and am going
to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a
guess. Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend
our guess-work to be something else.

I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare for
us as 'the whistling rustic tends his plough,' we have work dating
somewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeable
beauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until we come to the
Norman builders of five or six hundred years later. I want you to let
your minds dwell on these long stretches of time--four hundred years or
so of Roman occupation (counting, not from Caesar's raids, but from the
serious invasion of 43 A.D. under Aulus Plautius, say to some while after
the famous letter of Honorius, calling home the legions). You may safely
put it at four hundred years, and then count six hundred as the space
before the Normans arrive--a thousand years altogether, or but a
fraction--one short generation--less than the interval of time that
separates us from King Alfred. In the great Cathedral of Winchester
(where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers specially beloved, Isaak
Walton and Jane Austen) above the choir-screen to the south, you may see
a line of painted chests, of which the inscription on one tells you that
it holds what was mortal of King Canute.

Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of Kings.

But if you walk around to the north of the altar you will find yourself
treading on tiles not so very far short of twice that antiquity.
Gentlemen, do not think that I would ever speak lightly of our lineage:
only let us make as certain as we may what that lineage is.

I want you to-day to understand just what such a pavement as that
preserved for your inspection in Downing Street meant to the man who saw
it laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years--more or less--ago. _Ubi
Romanus vicit, ibi habitat_--'where the Roman has conquered, there he
settles': but whether he conquered or settled he carried these