have admired it-that Pliny has praised it-and Vrgil himself must have beheld it; for so close is the resemblance between the description in the Æneid and the statue, that it is certain the poet must either have copied the sculpture, or the sculptor realized the conception of the poet. And as the great artists who sculptured the Laocoon lived about the age of Alexander the Great, we must conclude that Virgil, and consequently that Augustus, Horace, and Mecænas, must have beheld and admired its matchless sublimity. Three thousand years have passed away since it was formed, and still it stands in unchanged, undiminished grandeur. It has been the admiration of every successive generation, that the hand of Time has swept into the common tomb; and, while the world remains, it will be the wonder and the praise of the generations yet to come! Incomprehensible power of Genius, that workest thy own immortality!-That in thy sublime aspirations after perfection, seemest to divest thyself of the trammels of matter, to soar even into the heavens, to behold revealed the blissful creations of fancy, the purer worlds of beauty and of truth, and to bring down upon earth the fair forms of light and love that dwell in brightness there-O thou! wonder the names, it has been sometimes attributed. It has likewise been of late ascribed to Bernini, but it is unfortunate for his claim to it, that it was executed fifty years before he was born. The two broken arms of the children have been wretchedly restored. Possibly they have been done by Giovanangelo. ously endowed with that deep powerful glance of intuitive perception, which alone penetrates the hidden mysteries of nature-searches out the dark passions of the soul, unfolds the secrets of our being, and brings to view the unfathomed horrors of death and of despair-What art thou, and whither dost thou tend? Light of the world! whose living fires stream with unquenchable beams through the long course of departed or of coming time, illuminating the darkness of past ages, and tinging the future with glory and promise-by whose mysterious force we are elevated to rapture, or transfixed with horror-we know thy immortality-we acknowledge thy influence-we feel thy power! You will, I know, think me distracted, and expect, of course, that my next letter will be dated from Bedlam-or, as I am not at present exactly in its neighbourhood, from the Ospedale de' Pazzi the asylum for the unfortunate lunatics who lose their wits at Rome. People, however, cannot well lose what they never possessed; and for this reason, perhaps, my good friend, I have not lost mine here. LETTER XIII. THE WALLS AND GATES OF ROME. I FIND myself wholly unable to attend to any thing modern at Rome, before I have seen all that is ancient; and, far from jumbling together ruins, churches, palaces, pictures, statues, and museums, in one wide chaos of confusion, as I see others do; I find the antiquities by themselves more than sufficient to employ my undivided attention; so that, having satisfied the first cravings of curiosity, by seeing every thing in the usual heterogeneous sort of pell-mell manner, I have resolved to visit the remains of Ancient Rome, in her hills, her forums, her temples, her baths, her theatres, her tombs, and her aqueducts, in distinct succession, without regard to their local situation, in order to form as clear an idea of what they once were, as the obscurity in which they are now involved will admit. But first let us look back for a moment on the dual growth of Rome from the beginning,-see the succession in which the Seven Hills were added gra |