man sports were forgotten, and they were in the dust. But let me restrain myself. Meditation here is inexhaustible, and how long we staid meditating and gazing upon these magnificent ruins, I should be afraid to tell you.

LETTER X.

VIEW OF ROME FROM THE TOWER OF THE CAPITOL.

ILEFT you yesterday at the Coliseum. We retraced our way through the Roman Forum, now no longer, except in name, the Campo Vaccino, and ascended to the summit of the lofty Tower of the Capitol. What a prospect burst upon our view! To the north, to the east, and even to the west, the Modern City extends; but to the south, Ancient Rome reigns alone. The time-stricken Mistress of the World, sadly seated on her deserted hills, amidst the ruined trophies of her fame, and the mouldering monuments of her power, seems silently to mourn the fall of the city of her greatness. On her solitude the habitations of man have not dared to intrude: no monuments of his existence appear, except such as connect him with eternity. A few decaying convents and churches, amongst which the Basilica of St John Lateran stands proudly preeminent, are the only modern buildings that meet the eye. From the Capitol, the ancient Citadel, on which we stand, we behold her hills, now heaped

with ruins, and shaded with the dark pine and cypress-the wide waste of the Campagna-the Plain of Latium, bounded by its storied mountains, and intersected by the far-distant windings of the yellow Tiber-the grass-grown Forum at our feet, with its shattered porticos, its fallen columns, its overthrown temples, and its triumphal arches, fast mouldering to decay-the broken wall of the Senate-house-the Palatine, Hill, which once contained infant Rome, now overspread with the shapeless ruins of the palace of her tyrants—the lofty vaults of the Temple of Peace--the broken fragments of the upper storey of the Baths of Titus-the lonely and tottering ruin of Minerva Medica in distance the gigantic circle of the Coliseum-the Colian Mount, crowned with the deep shade of cypress, with the broken arches of mighty aqueducts, and the crumbling walls of splendid temples-the massive ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, frowning in gloomy grandeur at the base of the further summit of the Aventine-the grey sepulchral Pyramid of Caius Cestius, backed by the turretted walls of the city— the Tower of Cecilia Metella—and, far beyond, the long black line of the Via Appia, marked by mouldering and forgotten tombs--and ruined aqueducts stretching over the deserted plain in majestic loneliness to the woody hills which terminate the view.

Such was the prospect that extended before us to the south. We looked down upon every spot rendered sacred by the early history of Rome, and it was delightful to retrace the romantic events of

that heroic period, so dear to our childish recollection, on the very scene where they had happened. There, beneath the northern base of the Palatine, the little Church of St Toto, or St Theodore, which occupies the site of the Temple of Romulus, marks the exact spot where the twins were exposed and suckled by the wolf, beneath the shade of the Ficus Ruminalis.

Upon the Palatine Hill, which rises immediately behind it, Romulus was stationed, and Remus on the Aventine opposite, on the eventful day when they stood to watch for the augury that was to determine their supremacy; and when the sword had confirmed the decree of fate, and the victor had murdered his brother, it was upon this hill (the Palatine) that he built Rome, and encircled that city of straw-roofed cottages with mud walls. It was upon the Capitol, the very spot where we are now standing, that he erected and fortified his citadel. It was in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, at the celebration of the games of Neptune, that he and his companions in arms carried off the Sabine women; and after the treachery of Tarpeia had admitted the Sabine army into the citadel, it was in the plain of the Roman Forum, immediately below us, that the battle was fought between the ravishers and their foes, which was so theatrically terminated by the wives and daughters rushing in between their husbands and fathers.

The Via Sacra was the path the two nations trod after peace was established, in solemn procession to the Capitol, where Tatius, the Sabine King, thence

forward held his regal seat. The Via Sacra is said to have received its name from the oaths taken on this occasion to observe the treaty, or the execrations uttered against those who infringed it, and not, as I had always ignorantly imagined, merely from being the sacred way to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which then was not built. We traced its now buried line, once tracked by the triumphal car of many a victorious chief, in front of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and beneath the arch of Septimius Severus. But where could we turn, that remembrance did not speak to us of departed glory?

To the west, the Tiber, sweeping round the base of Mount Aventine, whose deserted height is now crowned only with ruinous convents, and with the villa of a barbarian king,* rolls on in its lonely and desolate course through the swampy plain. Some faint traces still mark where its flood was once crossed by the Pons Sublicius, on which the single valour of Horatius Cocles stopped the progress of the whole Etruscan army, and saved his country from subjugation.

Nearly opposite are the quays and magazines of the Ripa Grande, the modern port of Rome, where not a single vessel now appears bearing the treasures of commerce to the ancient emporium of the world. Higher up is the Sacred Island of the Tiber, dedicated to Esculapius, formed, if tradition may be be

* The abdicated King of Spain.