Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/56

7, 1860.] been very like one of ourselves.

Turning over the box of relics, my friend in the black gaiters has directed my attention to—what do I find?—scores of cock’s legs with natural spurs, filed evidently to fit on bronze ones. That they knew how to fight a main of cocks at Uriconium is quite evident, and those legs in all probability were those of celebrated victors. Searching again, I found a cock made of lead, evidently a child’s toy, that had once gladdened little Roman eyes not far from where I stood.

Again rummaging, I come upon roundels formed from the bottoms of earthen-ware vessels, evidently used by the gamins of Uriconium in some game, possibly hop-scotch, which we know to be a pastime of remote antiquity. And then for the ladies, as Autolycus would say, I found in the museum, combs of bone, bodkins, beads, bracelets; and for the men, studs and buttons of bronze, a strigil to scrape his skin in the public sweating bath, and tweezers to tweak his curled beard. But what is this—a patent medicine in Uriconium? Yes—an eye-salve—here is the seal of the physician who vended it, marked, like Rowland’s Macassar, with his name to prevent “unprincipled imitations,” as follows:—

“The dialibanum of Tiberius Claudius, the physician for all complaints of the eyes, to be used with egg.”

But we may go on for a week turning over the curiosities of Uriconium and come at last to the conclusion that, Romano-Britons as they were, they must have ate, drank, slept, played, and looked wonderfully like ourselves. Not so, however, if we are to believe newspaper paragraphs—the barbarians who put an end to all this refinement ages ago.

In the corner of an orchard abutting upon the Watling Street road, in the village of Wroxeter, but within the old line of walls, upwards of twenty human skeletons were a short time since exhumed, several of the skulls of which presented extraordinary appearances. Their facial bones are, in fact, all askew, the eye sockets of one side of the face being in advance of those of the other side. Such terrible-looking creatures as these real original “Angles” were certainly enough to frighten the city into subjection. An examination of these skulls, however, and a knowledge of the conditions under which they were found, would lead to the conviction that Mother Earth has to answer for this distortion. When exhumed, they were in the condition of wet biscuit, in consequence