physic and food); the one to scour, the other to fat them in a fortnight; and their flesh thus recruited is most delicious. Here I say nothing of eringo-roots growing in this county, the candying of them being become a staple commodity at Colchester. These are sovereign to strengthen the nerves; and pity it is, that any vigour acquired by them should be otherwise employed than to the glory of God."

The poor have 2A. 2R. of land left by an unknown donor, and the dividends of £80 stock, derived from money left by the Rev. Joseph Avery, in 1719.

WALTON, the third parish, with its town perched on the sea cliffs, has grown into one of the most pleasant watering-places on the coast. A century ago it was a dreary tract, the resort of smugglers, and a point upon which the sea was making rapid inroads. Houses and fields, and even its church, have, in fact, been carried away by the waves, the foundations of the latter being at times visible far out in the waters. Modern energy and enterprise have changed the whole character of the place. A neat little new church has arisen, and the land has been protected from the further ravages of the sea. Excellent hotels, terraces, and villas have been built. A handsome pier has been provided. Altogether, its bracing air, with its fine beach and bold open sea; its pleasing walks, its brick octagonal building on the Naze, rising to the height of 80 feet, and from its summit affording splendid views inland and to seaward; its martello tower, a remnant of the old war, on the north; and the rich fossil treasures of its cliffs, it forms a summer resort as picturesque as it is becoming popular. Mr. T. Wilmshurst, in an interesting description of the place and its productions, says"The cliffs of Walton abound in the vestiges of a former state of this planet. In consequence of the crumbling nature of the cliffs, here termed "Antediluvian," these vestiges are laid bare to the eye, and fossil shells are always to be found, either projecting from the cliff, from which some ponderous mass has been recently detached, or strewn upon the beach. In the private collection of the late Mr. John Brown, F.G.S., of Stanway, is deposited the tusk of a mammoth; it is eight feet long, and 24 inches in circumference, and was found here on the beach, between high and low water marks. The shells are found generally in excellent preservation, among which are the terebratula, about one and a half inches long and thick, nearly oval, roughly striated transversely, and having a large foramen defined by a distinct border. The fossil oyster, or ostrea deformis, and the reversed whelk, murex contrarius, also furnish abundant specimens. Copperas stone, or pyrites of iron, as also 'coproliths,' are found upon the beach, and provide employment for many poor people in their collection. The copperas was formerly manufactured in Walton, but is now sent to London for that purpose. The ground on which the old copperas works stood is sufficiently apparent, an almost indelible mark being attached to it. The coproliths are small brown looking pebbles, and are valuable for manure, containing as they do about 50 per cent of phosphate of lime. On the north and north-west of Walton lies a comparatively inland sea, formed by a series of creeks, extending from a spot called Stone Point, about five miles along the northern shore. Many small vessels may be here observed dredging for the young oyster, or "spat," as it is termed; which is thence conveyed to the celebrated oyster beds of the River Colne, where they in due time arrive at maturity."

The charities consist of 10 acres of land given by John Sadler, in 1563, and Thomas Goulding, in 1582; and 25 acres by unknown donors; a rent-charge of £2, out of Pulpit field, purchased with money left by Charles Stevens, in 1613; an acre adjoining, given by an unknown donor in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and four cottages built on the site of ancient almshouses which fell down in 1843.

Borough of Colchester.

This borough, in point of population, trade, and income by far the most important in the county, contains the following sixteen parishes:those in roman type are within, and those in italic without, the ancient walls.

The history of Colchester in the earlier ages belongs to that of the county, and we have already traced it in our political narrative from the little stockade of the ancient Britons, raised as a protection for themselves and their cattle in the forest, to a great seat of Roman power, a thriving Saxon burgh, and a town over which the great Norman, Eudo Dapifer, after having its government committed to his hands, threw his protecting and patronizing shield, raising it in prosperity and adorning it with many noble buildings. We have seen its corporation entertaining sovereigns; its inhabitants stirred by the religious and political animosities of the times, and sustaining siege after siege, down to the last disastrous one of Fairfax, which ended with that sad scene of butchery in the Castle-bailey. As, from the high ground near the railway station, we look upon the town, clothing with its houses the opposite eminence, which rises gradually to the height of 112 feet above the Colne, these great events flash like an electric vision before us, till we see it rising gradually from the dust and desolation in which the civil wars had left it, but staggering at the work beneath the smiting of the plague, which raged here in 1665 and 1666, carrying off 4,731 persons-about half of the population-while a market is established at Weeley, because the countrymen who have food to sell fear to enter the death-tainted town; and collections are made for the suffering inhabitants in all the churches of the metropolis. Colchester was left fearfully weakened by this visitation. Again, however, it lifts its head, and flourishes under the stimulus given to it by the cloth-weaving or bay and say trade, introduced by the Flemings. It survives even the decay of this, once regarded as the staple of its support; and now we find it the handsomest and we conclude one of the most flourishing towns, as it is the most populous in the county: in the coming process of numbering its people they will probably be found to exceed 30,000.

As we descend from the station, we pass that noble charity, the Essex Hall Idiot Asylum, originally built at great expense, for the purpose of a first-rate hotel; but, failing as a hostelry, it has been converted into a hospital, in which children from the Eastern Counties are comfortably housed, and many of them redeemed from the living death of idiocy. As we enter the borough, we look with a feeling of almost reverence upon a town which existed before the Christian era, and was a place of importance and a seat of power when nearly all the rest of the county was a wilderness. As we glance down its main streets, however, we see in its elegant shops, hotels, and public buildings, the freshness and taste of the present day mingled with the memories of the past. Many changes and improvements have been made in the course of the last fifty years. The venerable but dark and dreary old Moot-hall, built by Eudo Dapifer, and in which the fathers of the borough had for centuries assembled in council, was demolished about 1844, and upon its site has risen a new Town-hall-an elegant stone building, the front forming a RomanDoric pilastrade of six pilasters, with a rusticated basement, the facade surmounted by a bold Doric cornice and balustrade. The cost was £6,000, of which £4,000 was raised by subscription, and the other £2,000 was paid out of the borough funds. The market near the Cups Hotel, for meat, poultry, and vegetables, was provided in 1813, at an outlay of £10,000, but trade obstinately refused to come to it, and it was a loss to the speculators. The old Dutch Bay Hall, at the top of High-street, in which the Flemings and their successors met and did business when the cloth manufacture flourished in the town, has disappeared, and in its stead is a modern building, erected in 1820, and the basement of which was the only corn market till 1846. It was then found inadequate for the trade, and the new Corn Exchange near by was erected, at the cost of £4,000, raised by shares. Carved on the window sill of one of the houses in High-street, a date was discovered some years ago, which appeared to be "1090," and, as many of the inner parts of the building had ancient arched passages and other signs of ancient grandeur about it, a fierce controversy arose amongst antiquarians, some contending this was one of the veritable houses raised by Eudo Dapifer. The house had been nearly rebuilt; and the probable solution is, that the builder had put down the date from some vague tradition, or that the first" O" was an old-fashioned "4,"the crossed bottom of which had been knocked off or worn away, and thus the real date was 1490. The streets of the borough are well paved and lighted, this duty being carried out, not by the corporation, but a body of commissioners appointed under acts, the first of which passed in 1623, and the last in 1847, for the improvement of the town and navigation, under which they levy paving and lamp rates in the town, and coal and tonnage dues in the port, which includes the Colne and its creeks, the part of the coast from St. Osyth point, N.N.E. to Walton, and eastward to Tollesbury Point. The inhabitants are well supplied with water by a company which draws it chiefly from a fine spring in Cheswell Meadow, St. Mary's parish, the ancient source, whence water was first brought into the town in 1536.

That Colchester was the Roman Camulodunum we have already assumed. Nor need we pause to re-argue the question. If, after comparing the historical records with its position-after glancing over the vestiges of the once stupendous earthworks at Lexden, which