the art of coach-making, could not be so very ignorant as not to know how to build a wall.  If it were not for the letters of Cicero, we should not believe a syllable about the war-chariots that carried amazement into the hearts of the Romans, even in Kent or Surrey.  But we here boldly declare, that if twenty Ciceros were to make their affidavits to the fact of a set of outer barbarians, like Galgacus and his troops, “sweeping their fiery lines on rattling wheels” up and down the Grampians—­where, at a later period, a celebrated shepherd fed his flocks—­we should not believe a word of their declaration.  Tacitus, in the same manner, we should prosecute for perjury.

The Saxons were a superior race, and when the eightsome-reel of the heptarchy became the pas-seul of the kingdom of England, we doubt not that Watling Street was kept in passable condition, and that Alfred, amidst his other noble institutions, invented a highway rate.  The fortresses and vassal towns of the barons, after the Conquest, must have covered the country with tolerable cross-roads; and even the petty wars of those steel-clad marauders must have had a good effect in opening new communications.  For how could Sir Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, or Sir Hildebrand Bras-de-Fer, carry off the booty of their discomfited rival to their own granaries without loaded tumbrils, and roads fit to pass over?

Nor would it have been wise in rich abbots and fat monks to leave their monasteries and abbeys inaccessible to pious pilgrims, who came to admire thigh-bones of martyred virgins and skulls of beatified saints, and paid very handsomely for the exhibition.  Finally, trade began, and paviers flourished.  The first persons of that illustrious profession appear, from the sound of the name, to have been French, unless we take the derivation of a cockney friend of ours, who maintains that the origin of the word is not the French pave, but the indigenous English pathway.  However that may be, we are pretty sure that paving was known as one of the fine arts in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; for, not to mention the anecdote of Raleigh and his cloak—­which could only happen where puddles formed the exception and not the rule—­we read of Essex’s horse stumbling on a paving-stone in his mad ride to his house in the Strand.  We also prove, from Shakspeare’s line—­

    “The very stones would rise in mutiny”—­

the fact of stones forming the main body of the streets in his time; for it is absurd to suppose that he was so rigid an observer of the unities as to pay the slightest respect to the state of paving in the time of Julius Caesar at Rome.