Sir,—Should any of your readers feel further interest in this subject, I would beg to refer them to your September number for my defence against Mr. Round’s repeated attacks, and contrast my paper with the misrepresentations which are now made of it in his note for this month. I would fain assume that these misrepresentations are not intentional, and that they may rather be attributed to that “lamentable confusion—truly distressing confusion,” which another contributor to your pages has described as characteristic of a former paper by Mr. Round, and which, indeed, seems to pervade all his papers. That these misrepresentations, however, exist will not for a moment be doubted by anyone who may make the comparison above suggested, and their existence, from whatever cause arising, must for the future preclude my bestowing any further notice of anything emanating from Mr. Round.
It seems almost unnecessary to specify any of the misrepresentations in question, but as something of the kind may be expected, and for the satisfaction of those who may not have seen my paper, or have an opportunity of easily referring to it, I will just cite one or two examples out of the numerous ones with which Mr. Round’s note abounds.
First, then, as regards the term “port or gate.” In employing the term port or gate as I did in my first paper, it was in the full assurance that these words are here absolutely synonymous, and that I was strictly correct in thus using the word port where it occurs in the Laws of Athelstan. On this point, however, Mr. Round thought fit to assail me, asserting that my “rendering outside the port or gate” was a mere “gloss” of my own on the word “port.” In consequence of this strange and somewhat unintelligible charge I was led to look into the question more closely, and found, though previously unaware of the fact, that I was entirely supported in my view and use of the words both by Camden and by Sharon Turner. In my next paper I accordingly quoted from Camden that at “Portgate,” on the Roman Wall, there was formerly a gate, as “the word in both languages” (Roman and Saxon) “fairly evinces.” On this passage, which it will be seen completely establishes my case, Mr. Round “evinces” his sense of fairness by suppressing all allusion to it. Again, it was pointed out that Sharon Turner distinctly uses the words as synonymous where he speaks of “the port-gerefa or the gerefa of the gate.” Nothing can be clearer or stronger than this, yet all notice of this is also suppressed, and Mr. Round, even after this has been pointed out to him, does not scruple to misrepresent me by repeating his assertion, and still arguing that in thus rendering the words “port or gate,” the words “or gate” are a mere “gloss” of my own. What opprobrium he intends to convey by the word “gloss” it is difficult to say, but, whatever it may be, your readers will now see that it applies quite as strongly to such high authorities as Camden and Sharon Turner as it does to me.
Further on, Mr. Round states that he has proved by demonstration that the markets were not held at the gates. I remarked in my paper that he might have spared himself the pains of proving what no one ever doubted, “the well-known fact that the forum was situated in the centre of a Roman town or city”; but I also pointed out what Mr. Round appears still to be ignorant of, that large transactions were conducted at the gates, the levying of tolls and the sale and purchase of merchandise, and thus “the word port, originally restricted to the gates where such extensive transactions were carried on, would at no distant period become applied,” in the way described, “to the town itself” (p. 114).
This latter passage, and all allusion to it, Mr. Round also suppresses, satisfying his sense of fair and reasonable argument in this case by merely harping again on the statement that “I proved by demonstration that the markets were never held at the gate,” which, in fact, no one at all conversant with the subject ever thought they were.
Apart, then, from what has here been thus briefly exposed, the character of Mr. Round’s papers is otherwise such as would deter me from giving any further time to their discussion.
A profuse rush of words—“verba et voces prætereaque nihil”—which seem to shun all approach to logical sequence, will not in the present day be accepted in place of the legitimate rules of reasoning, neither will they justify a writer who indulges in them in dispensing with the ordinary rules of courtesy.
James Hurly Pring, M.D.
TO CORRESPONDENTS.