and we left the "field of the Esquiline”* at last, without having encountered one living being.

From its present, we must turn to its past state. The Esquiline Hill, as well as the Viminal and Quirinal, was added to Rome by Servius Tullius, who enclosed the greater part of it within the circuit of his walls, and built his palace upon it, which he continued to inhabit till the day of his death.

It was in his flight from the Curia Hostilia, (the Senate-house) in the Forum, to this palace on the Esquiline, that he was murdered by the emissaries of Tarquin, his son-in-law; and it was on her return to it from the door of the Senate-house, where she had saluted her husband king, that his unnatural daughter commanded her chariot wheels to be driven over the mangled corpse of her father. The street where this horrible scene happened, and which was ever afterwards called the Vicus Sceleratus, must therefore have been between the Forum and the Esquiline;+ and though we have no other data to ascertain its precise situation, yet if your imagination desires some point to repose on, you may, if you please, follow Nardini, who fixes the very spot where the chariot wheels of this monster passed over the bleeding body of her parent, exactly at the fountain beside the Church of La Madonna de' Monti.

The Esquiline Mount, though thus early the seat of royalty, was, during the greater part of the

* Campus Esquilinus.

+ Livy, lib. i. c. 48.

republican age, the abode of the most mean and wretched of the Roman people, and their sepulchre. In that part of it which was without the walls, we are told their unburied bones were thrown,* a custom which reflects no great credit either on the decency, the humanity, or the policy of the Romans.

The Esquiline had, however, the honour of giving birth to the father of empire, Julius Cæsar,+ and with the empire it rose into importance. It was soon ennobled with the house and gardens of Mæcenas, of Virgil, of Sappho,‡ of the younger Pliny, of a part of Nero's Golden House, and of the Palace and Baths of the Emperor Titus, the ruins of which are still buried in its bosom. Since, therefore, it was the residence of emperors, ministers, favourites, and courtiers, it must have been that of the great and gay. They generally inhabited the Suburra, a long street which extended into the plain, and passed up this hill. Its precise situation is uncertain. After labouring through the long and perplexed dissertations that Nardini, and other departed antiquarians, have written upon this subject, and listening to the still more intolerable oral discourses that the existing tribe have poured into my wearying ears, I honestly confess I am no wiser.

* Vide Horace, Sat. viii. v. 14. 16.-Juvenal, &c. In various passages of the classics, this disgraceful custom is alluded to.

+ Julius Cæsar was born in that part of the Suburra which was situated on this hill.

‡ Vide Nardini, and the authorities quoted by him. Vide Pliny's Letters.

Cicero tells us there was an Altar to Bad Fortune, or Misfortune, upon this hill,* erected, it is to be supposed, in propitiation of that most forbidding deity; for such a worship could have been carried on upon no other principle than that on which the Indians adore the devil.

The etymology of this mount, you will be happy to hear, is not to be traced. It has two summits, L'Oppio, on which stands the Church of St Pietro in Vincula, built upon a part of the extensive Baths of Titus; and Il Cispio, crowned with the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and supposed to have been anciently occupied by the Temple of Juno Lucina.

The Esquiline is of wide extent, and undefined form, the most covered with ruins, and the most deserted of the three eastern hills of Rome,—the Esquiline, the Quirinal, and the Viminal.

*Cicero de Nat. Deor. 1. iii. c. 25.

Aram Malæ Fortunæ Esquiliis consecratam videmus.

LETTER XVIII.

VIMINAL AND QUIRINAL HILLS.

THE Viminal Hill is to me terra incognita. It is, or was, situated between the Esquiline and the Quirinal; and I suppose," if it be not gone, it "if must be there still." But I have already confessed my incapacity to discover it; and, though I have frequently since most diligently renewed my scrutiny, I have been able to descry nothing that, by any latitude of interpretation, can be construed into the least resemblance to a hill. The truth is, that it has sustained between its two puissant neighbours (the Esquiline and the Quirinal) that extinction which a small state sometimes suffers between two

large ones. It has received from them a martyrdom of rather a different description to that which St Lawrence underwent upon it some centuries before-a fact which I have the best authority for asserting-viz. that of the saint himself. At least, an Italian Count, who always talks to me in English, told me, that" San Lorenzo did say among his acts, that he was heated up, on a gridiron in the Baths of Olympiate, fitch fare on the Hill Viminall, fare now stands his Church of de bread and de ham."

Now, as the Count, and all the antiquarians, maintain that this church of de bread and de ham, (or S. Lorenzo in pane perna-so called, I believe, from the doles of bread and ham formerly dealt out to the poor at the convent door,) stands upon the Viminal; and as, it seems, St Lorenzo,-who certainly ought to know best,-says himself he was broiled alive there, I comfort myself with the conviction, that, when I was at that church, I must, unknown to myself, have seen, and even stood upon, that mount; though, to ordinary eyes, the said church seems rather to be in a hollow than upon a hill.

The Viminal, wherever it was, is said to have been so called from the altar of Jovis Vimineo, that stood upon it, or, perhaps, the altar received its name from the hill, and the hill from the osiers that per haps grew upon it;* or, perhaps, it bore some allusion to Vimen, a name for the caduceus of Mercury. The etymology is dubious, and has been the subject of much discussion; its obvious deriva tion from Collis Viminalis, the Hill of Osiers, the most satisfactory and reasonable,-perhaps, on that account, is much contested by the generality of antiquaries.

We must now bend our steps to the Quirinal, which, like the Viminal and Esquiline, was added to Rome by Servius Tullius; ‡ for although ancient

* Varr. L. iv. 8.

+ Stat. Th. ii. 30.

Livy, lib. i. c. 44.