In the inside, the destruction is more complete. The marble seats are all torn away; the steps and the vomitories overthrown, and the sloping walls and broken arches which once supported them, are now overgrown with every wild and melancholy weed, waving in all the luxuriance of desolation.

In the centre of the grass-grown arena stands a huge black cross, which liberally promises two hundred days' indulgence to every person who kisses it, (heretics not included, I presume;) and many were the kisses we saw bestowed upon it;-no wonder, indeed! The pious persons who saluted it, afterwards applied their foreheads and chins to it in a manner which they seemed to feel highly comfortable and consolatory.

The French-who perhaps did not expect to profit by its indulgences-shewed it no indulgence on their part, but took the liberty to knock it down; remorselessly depriving the Romans of the benefit of two hundred days of indulgence, for which they certainly deserved to be condemned themselves, without benefit of clergy. They also carried off, at the same time, the pictured representations of the fourteen stages of Christ's pilgrimage under the cross, which are again reinstated in their ancient honours, and stand round the beautiful elliptical arena, grievously offending the Protestant eye of taste, however they may rejoice the catholic spirit of piety.

There are other of their improvements which have been suffered to remain, that we would rather have seen removed. French taste has formed a little

public garden at the very base of the Colosseum, so wofully misplaced, that even I, notwithstanding my natural passion for flowers, longed to grub them all up by the roots, to carry off every vestige of the trim paling, and bring destruction upon all the smooth gravel walks.

We ascended, by a temporary wooden stair-case, to the highest practicable point of the edifice-traversed the circling corridors, and caught, through the opening arches, glimpses of the scattered ruins, the dark pine-trees, and purple hills of the distant country, forming pictures of ever-varying beauty and interest. We looked down on the vast arena; its loneliness and silence were only broken by some Capuchin friars kneeling before the representations of our Saviour's last suffering pilgrimage, and muttering their oft-repeated prayer as they told their beads.

What solitude and desertion!-What a change from the day that Titus dedicated it by the slaughter of five thousand wild beasts, and the savage combats of gladiators; when Roman gallies rode in its ample arena in all the counterfeit confusion of a mock naval fight; and when shouts of acclamation rent the air from a hundred thousand voices at once! On that wide arena, so often deep in blood, were now only to be seen the symbols and the worship of a religion then unknown, but which, even in its most corrupted state, has banished from the earth the fiend-like sports and barbarous sacrifices that disgraced human nature. Well may we call this amphitheatre the School of Cruelty! When we reflect

that the infliction of torture was here enjoyment— that murder was practised for recreation—that the signal was deliberately given for the butchery of a disarmed and bleeding suppliant-that even woman's pitiful nature feasted on the writhing gladiator's last agonies-and that the shouts of savage joy with which these walls so often re-echoed, were called forth by his dying groans ;-shall we not be tempted to think men demons, since they could find delight in horrors such as these?

The clear blue sky, in calm repose above our heads, breathed its serenity into our minds. The glorious sun shed its beams of brightness on these walls with undiminished splendour. Nature was unchanged--but we stood amidst the ruins of that proud fabric, which man had destined for eternity. All had passed away-the conquerors, the victims, the imperial tyrants, the slavish multitudes; all the successive generations that had rejoiced and triumphed, and bled and suffered here. Their name, their language, their religion, had vanished-their inhuman sports were forgotten, and they were in the dust.

But let me restrain myself. Meditation here is inexhaustible, but to others, our own meditations can rarely be interesting. There is a charm in these magnificent ruins, powerful but indefinable, and we lingered amongst them till the day was done.

The life of the vanquished combatant depended on the will of the people. If they turned down the thumb, (polli cem premere) he was spared; if they turned it up, (pollicem vertere) he was murdered. Vide Pliny, lib. xxviii. c. 2, § 5. Juv. Sat. III. 36.

LETTER X.

VIEW OF ROME FROM THE TOWER OF THE CAPITOL.

I LEFT you yesterday at the Colosseum. 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 pre-eminent, 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 story of the Baths of Titus-the lonely and tottering ruin of Minerva Medica in distance the gigantic circle of the Colosseum-the Coelian 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 on the the slope of the further summit of the Aventinethe 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.

*The plain of Latium, over which the view from the Capitol extends, is said to be forty miles in diameter.