this way, by burying alive some of each nation, they pretended they were put in possession of it! as if the gods could be thus juggled out of their irreversible decrees!

Thus, eight human victims, innocent of crime, suffered the most cruel of punishments, to satisfy the guilty and barbarous superstition of the enlightened Romans. This horrible fact would be wholly incredible, if it were not supported by the authority of their own historians.*

There are no other remains of antiquity contained within the limits of this Forum, but there is one close to it, to which I shall now conduct you—the Cloaca Maxima, unquestionably the most ancient of all the ruins of Rome, and the only vestige of the work of her kings.

It was built by Tarquinius Superbus, and served not only as a common sewer to cleanse the city, but as a drain to the Velabrum, through which it passed.

This work was begun by Tarquinius Priscus, who "drained the low grounds of the city about the Forum, and the vallies lying between the hills, (the Palatine and Capitoline) by Cloace, which were carried into the Tiber."+

But the drain was imperfect, and the Cloaca Maxima we now see was built by Tarquinius Superbus. It crossed the Roman Forum beneath the level of the pavement; and, in ancient times,

* Vide Livy, Dec. ii. lib. xx. c. 34; and Plutarch's Life of Marcellus.

+ Livy, lib. i. c. 38.

Ibid. lib. i. c. 56.

it is said the tunnel was so large, that a waggon loaded with hay could pass through it. Now, all that we see of it is the upper part of a grey massy arch of peperin stone, as solid as the day it was built, through which the water almost imperceptibly flows. Though choked up nearly to its top by the artificial elevation of the surface of Modern Rome, it is curious to see it still serving as the common sewer of the city, after the lapse of nearly three thousand years.*

* Some architects, in order to support their improbable theory, that the construction of the arch was not known even in Greece (where the art had reached a perfection it will never more attain) till about a hundred years before the Christian era, have attempted to controvert the antiquity of this stupendous work, and attribute it to a much later period. But if it had really been rebuilt-as a late learned antiquary chose to imagine-by Augustus, would it have escaped the notice of Suetonius? or would the minute and accurate historian, who extols its grandeur and antiquity, and carefully chronicles the erection of every temple and basilica, have failed to record such a work as this, which must have been executed before his own eyes, and by the very prince in whose court he was living? But, on the contrary, he expressly says, "that Tarquin made the great Subterranean Cloaca to carry off the filth of the city, a work so vast, that even the magnificence of the present age has not been able to equal it." Livy, lib. i. c. 56. It may indeed seem incredible, that the Romans in that rude age should have been capable of executing such a noble piece of architecture; but Livy tells us, that "Tarquin sent for artists from all parts of Hetruria," for this and his other public works. Nothing can be clearer than this evidence of the Cloaca Maxima being the work of the Tarquins; and its denial only affords one of the many proofs,

When the Tiber, into which it flows, is flooded, the water in the Cloaca is driven back so as to rise above the key-stone of the arch, and hide it from view. When the Tiber is low, the arch through which it discharges its sordid flood into that river, may be seen from the Ponte Rotto; or, still more distinctly, from the river itself.

that antiquaries will pervert, or overlook facts, when they interfere with their favourite theories. The Cloaca, therefore, is doubly interesting, not only from its extraordinary grandeur and antiquity, but from being perhaps the sole, and certainly the finest remains of Etruscan architecture that has come down to our times. With respect to the date of the introduction of the arch, since it was practised at this early period by the Etruscans, we cannot suppose it unknown to the Greeks. The earliest specimens extant of the arch, indeed, are formed in a very simple manner, by the inclination of two long blocks of stone erected on the lintels, and inclined till they meet each other in an angle, something like our small Gothic pointed arch. This occurs in one of the chambers of the great pyramid in Egypt, and in gateways among the ruins of Mycena in Greece, and also in the massy Cyclopean walls of the fortress of Tyrinthus, (which is built in the form of a ship,) situated on the road between Nauplia and Mycenæ, in which a vaulted passage of considerable length is arched in this manner throughout its whole extent. But the wide circular arches of the Cloaca Maxima are regularly built with the vault, key-stone, &c. and as entire as if finished yesterday. So also is the arch of the Emissarium of the Alban lake, built four hundred years before the Christian era, and consequently three hundred before the period of the invention of the arch, according to these theorists. The arch of Fabius at Rome too, and several more, must have preceded it considerably.

Almost close to the Cloaca Maxima, we were shewn the far-famed Fountain of Juturna,-that nymph on whom Jupiter thus conferred immortality. If this really be that transformed fair one, she has met with that neglect which is too frequently the lot of aged ladies; for the waters, which in her more youthful years were held sacred, and used only for the holy sacrifices of Vesta, now flow forgotten; and while a thousand fountains in Rome throw up streams unknown to fame, none has been erected for the classic source of Juturna. I tasted of the "crystal wave," and fancied it particularly fine.

LETTER XXII.

THE PANTHEON.

ROME presents no greater attraction to the stranger than the Pantheon, now the Rotonda, one of the largest and most beautiful temples of antiquity; the boast of the Romans themselves in the proudest era of their arts, and perhaps the only pagan temple in the world, which, after eighteen centuries have passed away, still preserves its primeval form and its ancient grandeur.

The beautiful solitude which surrounds the Coliseum, adds a secret charm to the pleasure we feel in surveying it. Not so the Pantheon. Its situation, on the contrary, tends as much as possible to dissolve the spell that hangs over it. It is sunk in the dirtiest part of Modern Rome; and the unfortunate spectator, who comes with a mind filled with enthusiasm to gaze upon this monument of the taste and magnificence of antiquity, finds himself surrounded by all that is most revolting to the senses, distracted by incessant uproar, pestered with a crowd of clamorous beggars, and stuck fast in the congregated filth of every description that covers the slippery pavement; so that the time he forces