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the Gardens of the Tuilleries, to furnish excitement for the sensitive citizens of Paris. What may be the destiny of the inferior deities and their cortéges it would be fruitless to imagine. One thing is certain-that, ere many centuries roll away, they will migrate to colder climes. MODERN ROME may be said to derive life from the dead, and to extract nutriment from stone. She fattens on the statues of her gods, the bones of her saints, the busts of her heroes, the ruins of her temples, the remains of her arts, and the renown of her forefathers! But the superstitious veneration for her religious relics is rapidly subsiding; and the monuments of her antiquity are crumbling into dust. The attractive remains of her arts will soon be attracted elsewhere by the magnet of ruthless power and insatiate cupidity. The seven hills will become as deserted as the surrounding Campagna, and, after various revolutions, moral and physical, on the surface of our planet, some future Romulus or Tarquin may, to his astonishment, find a CLOACA Constructed by hands. unknown on the Banks of the Tiber, for draining a new city, and furnishing antiquarians of the 99th century with ample food for speculation and controversy!

· At last the eye, fatigued by the contemplation of endless, often of nameless masses of ruins, takes a wider range over the broad and triste Campagna, strewed with tombs and strode by aqueducts; but exhibiting no other traces of MAN-save the lonely POST-HOUSE or tottering watch-tower, heightening rather than breaking the silence and the solitude of the scene! The few patches of cultivation are lost among reeds, bulrushes, and grass!

How strange was the taste, and how strong was the propensity of the ancient Romans, for lining their roads with the tombs of the dead! True, the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA was never very fit for any thing else but a burial ground. The complaint of Cicero, that the mausolea of the dead, on the Via Appia, left no room for mansions of the living, was frivolous-perhaps sarcastic. This wide and pestiferous plain, probably the filled-up

TOMBS ON THE VIA APPIA.

165

crater of a huge antediluvian volcano, was a proper, and wellproportioned cemetery for the metropolis of the world. But the remark of Cicero, as well as common sense, shews that the principle of constructing tombs over the dead, is at variance with the welfare of the living, leaving the vanity of the procedure out of the question. It cannot be maintained that the lifeless clay of the rich man is more entitled to a marble edifice than that of the pauper ;-and if one in one hundred, or even in one thousand of the defunct population were to have a house over his ashes, the surface of this earth would, in time, become encrusted with tomb-stones !*

Was it parental, filial, or conjugal affection that blanched yon CAMPAGNA with weeping marble, and studded its highways with storied urns and animated busts? No, indeed! The VIA APPIA was the great heraldic registry of ancestral pride and patrician prodigality, where the monuments of the dead vied in splendour with the mansions of the living-both erected from the same motives-both governed by the same principle-the gratification of VANITY!

The moralist, the divine, and the philosopher may gravely descant on the impressive lesson which the Campagna that was, and the Campagna that is, must read to the high and mighty of the earth. A glance from the Tower of the Capitol, in the opposite direction, will show that the lesson has made no other impression than that of stamping the seal of pride upon poverty, and of poverty upon pride!

* Look, for instance, at that mountain of Tiburtine stone, the sepulchre of CECILIA METELLA-the wife of the rich and thick-skulled CRASSUS, who very appropriately encircled the freize of the tomb with the crania of oxen-built the walls thirty feet in thickness-spread the sepulchre over ninety or one hundred feet in diameter-and all to enclose a small chamber for a marble sarcophagus, which is now daily exhibited in the shew-room of the Farnese Palace! The golden urn that contained the ashes of Cecilia was melted into coins or crosses that have since undergone more transfigurations than VISHNOU!

Paupertate omnes.

-Hic vivimus ambitiosâ

It was conceded that the aqueducts and cloaca were exempt from suspicions of impure motives in their construction. It is questionable, however, whether VANITY did not predominate over utility, in carrying streams of water from the neighbouring mountains through the air, on the shoulders of stupendous arches, when they might have been conducted, at one thousandth part of the labour and expence, through unseen and unostentatious pipes in the earth. But it has been said that the ancients were unacquainted with that hydraulic law which commands water to rise to its level however deeply bent downwards in its course. They knew this law practically; for, on several occasions, when the enemy was approaching, or expected in the Campagna, the water was conducted by subterranean conduits to the city. The mighty arches of the aqueducts were therefore unnecessary, since the lake of Albano or the river Anio might have been made to travel under the surface of the Campagna, and rise in copious floods to the summit of the Capitol. The very same kind of conduits along which the water runs in the aqueducts, would have preserved it pure through every kind of soil-and brought it to its various issues at a much cooler temperature in the scorching Summers of Italy, than it comes with, by its loftier route. But a still more serious objection lies against the admired aqueducts of the ancients. By this plan the pressure of the parent reservoir cannot be, or at all events, is not made to force the water to the tops of the houses, and thus to cleanse away the intolerable accumulation of domestic filth. Nay, with all the parade of these stupendous constructions, nine-tenths of the waters bubble away in fantastic fountains, without ever entering the houses at all— except when carried thither, as in the days of Romulus, on the shoulders of the fair sex!

The eye is carried almost unconsciously along the lines of tottering aqueducts, striding like solemn funeral processions across the plains of desolation and death-and alights, with

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something like the pleasure of escaping from the tomb, on the heights of ALBANO, studded with villas, villages, and towns, white as Parian marble, and contrasting with the monotony and sepulchral solitude of the dreary Campagna.

This SOUTH view from the TOWER of the CAPITOL-or, in other words, the view of "ROME in RUINS," is enough for one day, and the traveller should not abruptly break the chain of reflections excited by the objects there presented to his sight, by a survey of the scene which the opposite view commands.

Returning to my hotel, I dined, without knowing what I ate or drank-threw myself on my couch-and, notwithstanding the clattering of English carriages in the court of the "HOTEL DES ISLES BRITANNIQUES," enjoyed the luxury of a DERVISE dream, in which the events of ten centuries passed in vivid procession, though in wild fantastic order before the mental eye, during an earthly oblivion or equivocal existence of six short

hours.

NORTHERN VIEW;

OR,

MODERN ROME.

Communion with the DEAD is safer, if not more instructive than communion with the LIVING. The race of ancient Rome and her countless inhabitants is run-their cause is adjudicated -the prisoners are acquitted or condemned by the tribunal of posterity. Censure cannot injure them-praise cannot soothe them-flattery cannot betray them. Their lives are become history-and history is a text, from which every one has a right to preach. With modern Rome and modern Romans it is different. They have eyes to see-ears to hear-senses to feel. Travellers should, therefore, be guarded in their expressions, measured in their language, temperate in their strictures-in

dulging only in generalities; and sedulously avoiding personalities. For my own part, preferring no pretension to either time, opportunity, or talent for a scrutiny of men or manners, I skim the surface, and merely note the impressions which obvious and prominent objects make on the senses, together with the reflections which these impressions excite in the mind. As a slight and superficial observer, I only address myself to readers of similar character; and, as there are various gradations of intellect and taste in this world, so a link in the vast chain may somewhere exist, on which these trifling and evanescent sketches may hang for a day.

Of all the scenes which I have beheld on the surface of the globe (and they have not been few) that which is surveyed from the TOWER of the CAPITOL, is the most interesting. I wonder that Mr. Burford has not selected it for a panorama-perhaps I may be the means of inducing him to such an attempt.* The contrast between the southern and northern prospects is truly astonishing. It is like a resuscitation from death to life-from the dreary vault to the cheerful haunts of man-from the silence of the catacombs to the bustle of active existence in a crowded city. Such is the contrast, if we turn, at once, from south to north. If we gradually veer round, from the two opposite points of the compass, we shall perceive a curious amalgamation of ancient and modern times. To the Westward, the seed of David is seen springing up close to the ruins of the Cæsarian palaces on the Eastern side, the successor of ST. PETER has erected his earthly tabernacle contiguous to the once licentious, but now consecrated, BATHS of DIOCLETIAN! In the midst of the modern city stand the Pantheon of Agrippa and the Column of Aurelian, like two venerable ancient FATHERS who have just started from their graves, and are calmly, but sorrowfully, contemplating the fallen state of their enfeebled descendants! Beyond the yellow Tiber to the North-west, the attention is divided by two most stupendous objects-the embattled tomb

* I find that this ingenious Artist did exhibit such a view several years ago.

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