sewers, with its Cloaca Maxima, whose highest keystone was thirty feet above its base, remain even now in sufficient preservation to attest the astonishing scale upon which every work of imperial Rome was executed. The Cloaca Maxima owes its origin to Tarquinius Superbus, and the portions still existing, though ruined and chocked up, and no longer of use to cleanse and purify the modern city-much needing as it does such useful ducts-are wonderful monuments of solid and enduring masonry. Its acqueducts, some of them carried over arches for many miles, at a level varying with the undulating surface, but sometimes upwards of an hundred feet above their foundations, are no less astonishing proofs of the magnificent scale upon which all the works of ancient Rome were planned and executed. Temples, palaces, baths, tombs, triumphal arches, theatres, and every class of structure of which any remains have been preserved to our time, are all of the same character, testifying to the grand conceptions which the revenues and the pomp and glory of a world-wide empire gave birth to. Nor was all this magnificence a mere empty show. Time brought about its restless, unceasing changes, and luxury and enervating love of pleasure crept over the heart of the great empire, choked up the fountain of its former strength and greatness, and prepared the way for its fall. But there was a time, still memorable in the history of Rome, when its magnificence served as an incentive to patriotism and virtue.

We can form but a very slight and inadequate idea of what the Forum was in the era of Roman greatness. Yet we can realize some conception of it from the indications of its ancient site and the contemporary descriptions of its original splendour. Surrounded with temples, approached through triumphal arches and avenues of statues, and overlooked by the Imperial Palace which crowned the Palatine Hill, and by the Capitol, the citadel alike of

Rome's strength and of her faith, it was well calculated to awake the exulting pride of the ancient Roman, the "citizen of no mean city," but the privileged sharer in the rights, the glories, and the immunities which were his peculiar birth-right. This it was which enabled Manlius, pointing from the Forum to the Capitol, to stay the sentence of the ungrateful Romans, and guided Scipio Africanus, instead of stooping to his defence when accused by envious detractors before the same fickle bar, to turn to the overlooking height of the Capitoline Hill, and bid them leave the tribune of the Forum, where he stood as a criminal, and join him there in the temple of the supreme deity of their creed, that both together might thank the gods for the defeat of Hannibal and his Carthagenian host. While such things are possible, the virtue of a nation is still powerful for good and great deeds. But the spirit of national pride and public honour shrunk before the luxuries of licentious tyrants and the baseness of mercenary legions. Rome had accomplished the purposes for which empire had been allotted to her, and then she sunk, not indeed to pass away into oblivion, but to give place to that new and unparalled empire, half spiritual, half still imperial, with now a licentious Alexander, or John, wearing its papal tiara; and then, as of old, a warlike Julius, a luxurious Leo, and-unknown before— an ascetic Adrian.

Under such rulers, Rome received new glories above the ruins of those that time and misfortunes had crumbled and buried beneath their debris. But an entirely new character marks not only what has replaced the old, but even what survives of its remains. It lacks the stern manliness of Rome's best days, and the associations which could awake the generous sympathies of a people. It holds indeed the strange empire derived from the en thronement of the spiritual ruler of Christendom, mighty to wield the keys of heaven and hell. But superstition

must sustain the throne, and ignorance and moral degra dation attend to secure the services of its abject subjects. Medieval Rome is a great, a most wonderful centre, round which the history of Europe revolves, but its greatness dazzles the eye without winning the heart. It seems to have no citizen of its own, and as little to command the pure emotion of the world's citizens, as did old Rome, in her day of triumph, win the love of the captives who added to the glories of her triumphal displays. It is not, therefore, without reason that the poet thus gives vent to feelings which have been sympathized in by thousands, as they gazed on modern Rome, and thought of what once she was:

"Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.

What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day-

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;
An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow,

Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?

Rise with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress

"The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire,

Have dealt upon the seven-hill'd city's pride;

She saw her glories, star by star, expire,

And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,

Where the car climb'd the capitol; far and wide
Temple and tower went down, nor left a site:-
Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,

And say, 'here was, or is,' where all is doubly night?

"The double night of ages, and of her,

Night's daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and wrap
All round us; we but feel our way to err:
The ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desert, where we steer
Stumbling o'er recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry Eureka!' it is clear-
When but some false mirage of ruin rises near."

The poet felt that "the commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome," had passed away, and been succeeded by others whose greatness seems a mockery beside their grandeur. Yet the monuments of Rome's old magnificence show how petty often were the ends for which nations were conquered, that their treasures might flow into the imperial treasury. Of all the ruins still existing, none can be compared with their ancient amphitheatre, the magnificent Colosseum reared by the Emperors Vespasian and Titus. Yet this is but the reconstructed materials of an older and more sumptuous edifice; for the Emperor Vespasian is said to have ordered its construction with the materials of the gorgeous palace of his predecessor, which was usually styled Nero's golden house. So solid, substantial, and skilfully designed is the vast Roman amphitheatre, that, had it been simply let alone, it would have remained perfect even now. It escaped the ravages of the Gothic spoilers of Rome, owing to its durable construction, and was used for the celebration of public games even in the thirteenth century. But the demolition of the most valuable architectural monuments of former ages has far more frequently been occasioned by deliberate cupidity, or the designed purposes of ignorance and presumption, than from the devastations of war, or the wasting effects of time. It was in the era of Rome's later revival, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that the solid masonry of the Colosseum yielded to the deliberate spoliation of ignorance and pride. Wealth and

luxury had again returned to Rome, and their attendant pomp and magnificence were once more aimed at; but personal vanity little heeds the sacrifices necessary to minister to its vanity. The Colosseum was converted into a convenient quarry. Papal authority conferred on every powerful noble, or greedy favourite, the right to spoil it for the materials with which to build or enlarge his palace; and thus this remarkable example of ancient architecture and engineering skill, was stripped of a large portion of its decorative exterior, and its interior entirely dismantled and laid waste. Fortunately, its substantial construction rendered even deliberate demolition a difficult task. Yet the work went on, and doubtless would ultimately have reduced it to a shapeless heap of ruins, when the Pope, Benedict XIV., who succeeded to the papal throne in 1740, luckily bethought him of the Christian martyrs who had perished within its arena. This wise occupant of the spiritual throne of Christendom conformed, with shrewd sagacity, to the changed aspect of the times in which he lived, and waived many of the obsolete pretensions of his predecessors. He was a great encourager of learning, and Rome became again, under his liberal patronage, the seat of science and the arts. From him Rome received many of its later embellishments, and had others of its earlier ones once more restored to it. He dug out the obelisk which lay buried in the Campus Martius, and which was afterwards raised on the pedestal it now occupies by Pius VI. It was in the same spirit that he raised a cross within the area of the Colosseum, and declared it consecrated, as the scene of early Christian martyrdom. One cannot but regret that the spirit of superstitious relic worship, and veneration for holy sites, which at an earlier period conferred a spurious sanctity on so many doubtful and fictitious objects of veneration, had not bethought itself of this genuine scene of Christian martyrdom. It is, in truth, the only scene in modern Rome which the Chris