thought no specimens were to be found before the thirteenth century, and Dr. Wallis imagined they might be traced in the times of the Saxons. Manuscripts indisputably coetaneous must decide this point; and with all due submission to their talents, natural and acquired, when applied to other subjects more in their own lines of pursuit, the manuscripts ought to be examined by persons better conversant in this branch of antiquities than these learned men seem to have been, if a judgment may be formed of their penetration and experience from their unsuccessful readings of inscriptions on stone and wood.
Mr. North has well criticifed Dr. Ward's exposition of the date on the gateway near the great bridge at Cambridge[1]; and you have made some pertinent remarks on his erroneous conception of the letters in the Rumsey window, as well as on the figures on the Mantle Tree at Saffron Walden, that are more likely to have been meant for vine tendrils on the Ton, that was part of the device of the name of Mydleton[2]. And after what I have suggested in the foregoing pages, may I presume to advance that Dr. Willis's view and report of the Helmdon mantle-tree infcription deemed by him a paramount proof of the truth of his hypothesis, was superficial and unsatisfactory?
Not long after Dr. Wallis communicated his paper to the Royal Society, he was favoured by a learned friend[3] with a copy of an inscription over the great gate of the college of St. Augustine at Bristol, which was concluded with these numerals 11(
symbol characters)0; and this
- ↑ Archaeolog. V. X. p. 372.
- ↑ Vetusta Monumenta, Vol. II. No 19.
- ↑ Cono-cuneus, &c. fol. 1684. Additions and Emendations, p. 153. The friend referred to was Dr. Thomas Smith, fellow of Magdalen college in Oxford (a reverend and learned person, and a curious observer of antiquities, both at home and in foreign countries, as far as Greece and Turkey).
was
