Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of the South Country; from the noble antiquity of Winchester to the splendour of Beachy Head they run like an indestructible line of Latin verse beneath the blazon of England.  They stand up between the land and the sea, the most Roman thing in England, and of all English land it is their white brows that the sun kisses first when it rises over the sea, of all English hills every morning they are the first to be blest.

The most Roman thing in England I call them; and indeed this “noble range of mountains” has not the obvious antiquity of the Welsh mountains or the Mendip Hills, nor the tragic aspect as of something as old as time, as old as the world itself, of the dark and sea-torn cliffs of Cornwall, or the wild and desolate uplands of Somerset and Devon.  The South Downs seem indeed not so much a work of Nature as of man; and of what men!  In their regular and even line, in their continuity and orderly embankment, in their splendid monotony of contour they recall but one thing—­Rome; they might be indeed only another work of that mighty government which conceived and built the great Wall that stretches from the Solway to the Firth of Forth which marked the limit of the Empire and barred out its enemies.  And this wall of the South Downs, too, marked but 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