of
agriculture and building have broken up the old stones with their rude
inscriptions? We now and then come across a warning that the total absence
of monumental remains in a place may not mean that there never were any.
Many of you would say with confidence that we certainly have not
monumental remains from the original cathedral church of St. Paul's, built
in the first years of Christianity and burned after the Conquest. But we
have. They found some years ago a Danish headstone, with a runic
inscription of the date of Canute, twenty feet below the present surface
of the churchyard. You can see it in the Guildhall Library, or a cast of
it in our library here. I have no doubt there are many such, if we could
dig.

But it is of course impossible here to enter upon the evidence of the
monumental inscriptions. They deserve courses of lectures to themselves.
I may say that the language of the inscriptions connected with the British
Church is Latin, while in Ireland the vernacular is used, quite simply at
the great monastic centres of Clonmacnois and Monasterboice; markedly
Latinised at Lismore, the place of study of the south. In Cornwall the
inscriptions are mostly very curt, just "A, son of B," all in the genitive
case, meaning "the monument of A, who was son of B." In Wales they are
many of them much longer, and some of them in exceedingly bad Latin,
certainly not ecclesiastical Latin, almost certainly Latin such as the
Romano-Britons may have talked: "Senacus the presbyter lies here, _cum
multitudinem fratrum_;" "Carausius lies here, _in hoc congeries lapidum_."
One of the British inscriptions in Wales is charmingly characteristic of
the modesty of the race: "Cataman the king lies here, the wisest and most
thought-of of all kings." Cataman, by the way, is identified with Cadfan,
and Cadfan in his lifetime told the Abbat of Bangor his mind in very
Celtic style as follows (evidently he made a point of living up to his
epitaph): "If the Cymry believe all that Rome believes, that is as strong
a reason for Rome obeying us, as for us obeying Rome."

The question of the inscriptions is complicated by a very remarkable
phenomenon. There are in South Wales, at its western part, a large number
of what are called Ogam inscriptions, and in Devon there are one or
two[50]. In the south of Ireland there are large numbers. Outside these
islands no such thing is known in the whole world. The language is early
Gaelic, that is, the monu