LETTER XXIII.

TEMPLES-REPUTED TEMPLE OF VESTA-PUDICITIA PATRIZIA-BOCCA DELLA VERITA-ARA MAXIMA --TEMPLE OF FORTUNA VIRILIS-OF ANTONINUS AND FAUSTINA-OF ROMULUS AND REMUSOF PEACE ANCIENT STYLES OF BUILDING DOUBLE TEMPLE OF VENUS AND ROME-TEMPLE OF MINERVA MEDICA-OF VENUS AND CUPID OF VENUS ERYCINA.

FROM the Pantheon, I must now carry you to the Temple of Vesta, for such is the name the antiquaries of yore were pleased to give to a beautiful little temple near the Tiber, and such is the name it still bears, in despite of the antiquaries of the present day, who are now waging fierce battles about the different gods and goddesses to whom it might, could, or ought to have belonged. The claims of Phoebus, and Venus; of Portumnus, God of the Port, and Volupia, whose image, treading Virtue under foot, was certainly worshipped somewhere at Rome-very little to the credit of the Romans have at various times been brought forward; but at present the contest seems to lie between Her

cules and Vesta. The goddess has at least possession in her favour, and the defenders of her ancient rights maintain that hers it must be, because it was circular, and all the temples of Vesta were circular; and because it had windows, and the temples of Vesta alone had windows; and because it had an aperture at the top, and no other temple had an aperture at the top. The assailants, on the other hand, dispute the antiquity of the windows-deny the aperture at the top-bring Pliny to prove that the Temple of Hercules was circular also, and that it stood somewhere hereabouts-and wonder how any body can doubt that this is the Temple of Hercules.

To the confusion of these Heraclidæ, the party of Vesta again bring weighty testimony to shew that the Temple of Hercules stood in the Forum Boarium-that the limits of that Forum did not nearly extend to this spot; and since, therefore, it is not the Temple of Hercules, they conceive that it must indubitably be that of Vesta.

What, amid such contradictory assertions, are those who know nothing of the matter to believe ?

"Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
And antiquarians doubt—like Ré and Nibby?”

For my part, I shall not "halt between the two opinions," being firmly convinced that it was neither the one nor the other. For, as to the Temple of Hercules, which stood "somewhere hereabouts," so did fifty other temples beside; and, as

to the Temple of Vesta, there is not a shadow of reason to believe that it ever stood here at all; or, indeed, that there ever was any Temple of Vesta at Rome, except the ancient one originally built by Numa, and which unquestionably stood at the base of the Palatine Hill in the Forum.* All classic authors speak of the Temple of Vesta, as if there were only one; and if another had ever been built, we cannot doubt such an event would have been recorded. When Tacitus relates that the Temple of Vesta was burnt down and rebuilt in the reign of Nero, it is obvious that if there had been more than one temple, he would have particularised which; and when Horace alludes to a flood of the Tiber reaching even to the Temple of Vesta, as a memorable occurrence, it is also clear that he could not mean this temple on the very shore of the river, and almost every year overflowed by its waters, but the Temple of Vesta in the Forum, to which, though a remarkable, it was by no means an unprecedented, circumstance that they should reach; for in ancient times many more terrible inundations are recorded; and not to multiply instances, Livy relates that the Tiber overflowed not only the Forum, but all the low grounds of the city, and the whole plain of the Campus Martius, twelve times in one year. In modern ages, too, in the Pontificate of Clement VII., a flood happened which

* Vide Plutarch's Life of Numa Pompilius.
† A U. 564. Vide Livy, Dec. iv. l. 38.

compelled the inhabitants of Rome to fly in the middle of the night to the highest of her hills.*

Still, I am clearly of opinion, that since it has got the name of the Temple of Vesta, it should keep it; especially as we have no means of giving it a better, and never now can know what it is.

Be it what it may, it is beautiful. It is entirely built of Parian marble, and its portico is composed of a circular colonnade of twenty fluted Corinthian columns; but the entablature has long since disappeared; and though the French removed the vile modern wall that filled up the intercolumniation, the flat coarse tiled roof that still rests upon the graceful capitals, destroys much of their fine effect.

Within the colonnade, the small circular cella, built also of marble, is now converted into a chapel, dedicated to "La Madonna dell' Sole," (the Virgin of the Sun,) a curious coincidence with its reputed ancient worship of the Virgin Goddess of Fire. This little temple is supposed, from its style, to belong to the age of Domitian.

It stands in that part of ancient Rome, which was called the Pulchrum litis, or beautiful shore of the Tiber; but which no longer enjoys or merits that epithet.

Opposite to this beautiful building stands the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, built on the ruins of some ancient temple certainly, but of what, the antiquarians themselves do pot even pretend to

The Quirinal. Vide Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.

know; but they do know that it was not the Temple of Pudicitia Patrizia, as it is generally called, because there was no such temple; that divinity having only had a Sacellum, or, at most, an Ædicola. You will please to remember that an Edicola was a small covered place of worship, bearing much the same relation to a Pagan temple that a chapel does to a Christian church, and a Sacellum differed from it only in being open.

But the remains of the ruin, entombed within the frightful old church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, prove that it was a magnificent peripteral temple, with eight columns in front, like the Parthenon; and like it, too, it must have had fifteen at the sides, counting the angular one both ways, because the intercolumniations of the sides were always double in number to those of the front. Few. of these lateral columns are now visible, but six of the front columns may still be traced, built up in the wall of the church, and two more are to be seen in the sacristy, to which it is well worth while to ascend, to behold the beautiful Composite capitals of Parian marble, which are walled up in this wretched hole.

It was a strange perversity of taste, that could barbarously build up these noble columns of the ancient peristyle, and erect immediately in front of them, that mean little portico which now stares us in the face with its ugliness and deformity! Even though emphatically assured that it was the work of Saint Adrian I, (one of those works I suppose for which he was canonized,) we were unanimous