CHAPTER IV. ROME. All that was Cf them destruction is; and now, alas! lome-Rome imperial, bows her to the storm, Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm. CHILDE HAROLD. ROME has received, not without some elements of just claim to such title, the name of the Eternal City. Its early history is wrapped in myth and fable. Yet there is a latent truth involved in the story of the rival brother founders quarrelling, when Remus, in derision, leapt over its pigmy walls. Its origin was as obscure and unnoted as that of a thousand other cities, and long ere its rising importance had contributed a new interest to those stories of its infancy, they had become involved in the extravagances of legendary tradition, or substituted by the convenient inventions of more recent fable. While yet the great cities of Greece retained their arts and matchless schools of learning and philosophy, the newer capital of the world was rising into importance; and its first great act on the theatre of the world, was the strife which lasted, through successive generations, in the Punic wars, -a struggle to determine whether the scat of the world's empire should return to the African continent, or be continued to Europe, where Greece had already asserted the supremacy of intellectual empire. The Phoenician colony of Carthage struggled bravely for supremacy, but the younger colony of the European peninsula prevailed; involving in its success so much of the whole after-history of the continent, and the fate of our own little group of British islands, from whence we now look, with feelings of compassion, or perhaps of contempt, on the decrepid government of the ancient capital of the Roman world. A world-capital it, however, is, even now, in more than name. When the sceptre of imperial sway passed away from it, it had laid hold of a sceptre of spiritual rule, more absolute and despotic even than the old empire won by the legions of the Roman Cæsars. It was, indeed, part of the plan of Providence, by means of the Roman empire, to prepare the world for the extension of the more enduring kingdom of the Prince of Peace. The sceptre was not to depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, till Shiloh should come; and, in curious coincidence with this, when the fulness of time was accomplished, it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed; and all went to be taxed, every one into his own city; and Joseph also went up from Gallilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed, with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered, and she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for him in the inn. An old era was come to an end; a new era was beginning; and the Roman rulers, who worked out these great ends, dreamt not of the high purposes they were accomplishing. Even so it was in the destruction of Jerusalem, and the scattering of the chosen people from the land of promise, as narrated in a former chapter; and so too was it in the conquest of Europe and the subjugation of the British Isles. The Roman empire was but as the plough which pierces the hitherto unbroken and uncultivated soil. Rudely it tears through the flowery covering with which nature clothes the roughest and most profitless moorland waste. Rough and unmanageable appear the first rugged furrows. But other operations follow, and abundant harvests at length replace the useless gorse and heath. Such was the influence of the Roman, a bloody, yet valuable missionary of civilization; an unconscious instrument of Providence for working out ends undreamt of in his plans. A modern traveller thus justly expresses the feelings with which the traces of the capital of this wondrous empire are still reviewed :-" On our first visit we contemplated ancient Rome as she now appears, and from thence we passed to the consideration of the modern city. We now turn to ancient Rome again, and while we still tread the spot on which she stood, we recollect what she once was, and endeavour to trace out some of her majestic features still faintly discernible through the gloom of so many ages. The subject is intimately connected with the views of a classical traveller, and is indeed forced upon him in every morning walk. While he ranges over the seven hills, once so crowded with population and graced with so many noble fabrics, now inhabited only by a few friars, and covered with piles of ruin, he cannot but recollect that under the rubbish which he treads lies buried Imperial Rome, once the delight and the beauty of the universe. Deep interred under the accumulated deposit of the fifteen centuries, it now serves for the foundation of another city, which, though the fairest in the world, shines only with a few faintly reflected rays of its tarnished glory. If then the magnificence of modern Rome be an object of admiration and wonder, what must have been the majesty of the ancient city? Greater probably than the imagination of moderns, little accustomed to works of unusual beauty or magnitude, can conceive, and capable of astonishing, not strangers only, but even the Greeks themselves, though the latter were habituated to architectural scenery, and almost educated in the midst of temples and colonnades." It is this idea of the buried glories of Rome, of the changes of many successive centuries, and the novel beauties of medieval art, reared above the models from whence the principles on which they are constructed were first derived, that gives rise to some of the most peculiar feelings with which the intelligent mind receives the impressions produced by a visit to the singular city still enthroned on the banks of the Tiber. In all ages since Rome became the world's capital, it has been a marvel to men of every country and faith. Even the rude Gauls who forced its gates in the centuries preceding its imperial grandeur, gazed in awe and astonishment on its Forum, and the venerable senators who sat there in dignified silence, awaiting whatever should befall them. Doubtless it was not less strange and wonderful to the first captive Britons whom the Cæsars dragged unwillingly, bound to their triumphal cars, through the crowded streets of ancient Rome. But even the Greek, familiar with higher art, and with purer and not less gorgeous temples than those of Rome, owned the matchless splendour of the city of his conquerors. "Constantius," says Mr. Eustace, "a cold and unfeeling prince, who had visited all the cities of Greece and Asia, and was familiar with the superb exhibitions of Ephesus, Magnesia, and Athens, was struck dumb with admiration as he proceeded in triumphal pomp through the streets; but when he entered the Forum of Trajan, and beheld all the wonders of that matchless structure, he felt for once a momentary enthusiasm, and burst into exclamations of surprise and astonishment. Strabo, who had traversed Greece in every direction and was without doubt intimately ac quainted with all the beauties of his country, and, like every other Greek, not a little partial to its claims to preeminence, describes the magnificence of Rome as an object of transcendent glory, that surpassed expectation, and rose far above all human competition. "If Greeks so jealous of the arts and edifices of their native land; if emperors of the East, who idolized their own capital, and looked with envy on the ornaments of the ancient city, were thus obliged to pay an involuntary tribute to its superior beauty, we may pardon the wellfounded enthusiasm of the Romans themselves, when they represent it as an epitome of the universe, and an abode worthy of the gods. And indeed, if Virgil, at a time when Augustus had only begun his projected improvements, and the architectural glory of the city was in its dawn, ventured to give it the proud appellation of rerum pulcherrima, we may conjecture what it must have been in the reign of Hadrian, when it had received all its decorations, and blazed in its full meridian splendour. Even in its decline, when it had twice experienced barbaric rage and had seen some of its fairest edifices sink in hostile flames, it was capable of exciting ideas of something more than mortal grandeur, and raising the thoughts of a holy bishop from earth to heaven. After the Gothic war itself, which gave the last blow to the greatness of Rome, when it had been repeatedly besieged, taken, and ransacked, yet then, though stripped of its population, and abandoned with its tottering temples to time and desolation; even then, deformed by barbarism, wasted by pestilence and bowed down to the ground under the accumulated judgments of heaven, the 'Eternal City' still retained its imperial features, nor appeared less than the Mistress of the World." The magnificence of ancient Rome is still indisputable, though we should seek to prove it only from the last lingering fragments of its ruins. Its very cloacæ, or |