the slaughterers of antiquity. But even if the anticipation of this posthumous honour ever flashed across their minds, ere the spirit winged its flight, it was a poor equivalent for the consolation of closing their eyes in the land that gave them birth, amidst the sighs and tears of filial or parental affection-the sympathy of friends-and the solace of that religion, whose precepts are entwined with our earliest associations!

ST. JOHN LATERAN.

On sweeping the eye to the left, from the Pyramid of CAIUS CESTIUS, and closely following the line of the ancient wall, we are arrested by an object which it would be almost sacrilege to pass unnoticed-the Church-the mother of churches-ST. JOHN LATERAN! That first, if not most pious of Christian emperors, CONSTANTINE, whose arch has been mentioned, and whose noble achievements have been adverted to, constructed this holy edifice

or the edifice on whose ruins it is erected-while holy POPES and devout Christians deposited within its sacred walls the most awful and interesting relics on which the human eye ever gazed!

"First, the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, encased in silver busts, set with jewels—second, a lock of the Virgin Mary's hair, and a piece of her petticoat-third, a robe of Jesus Christ, sprinkled with his blood-fourth, some drops of his blood in a phial-fifth, some of the water which flowed out of the wound in his side-sixthly, some of the sponge-seventhly, the table off which our Saviour ate his last supper-eighthly, a piece of the stone of the sepulchre on which the angel sat-and lastly, the identical porphyry pillar on which the cock was perched when he crowed after Peter denied Christ."*

All these, and many others, may be seen on each Holy Thursday, in the Basilica of Constantine-and what faithful Catholic, or true believer, would grudge a journey over the Alps, to be

* Rome in the 19th Century.

Y

hold such awe-inspiring relics! Even if the heretic sceptic should shake his head in doubt, he must acknowledge that here is the actual font, formed of an antique basaltic urn, in which the first Christian emperor received his baptismal immersion. EUSEBIUS, it is true, informs us that Constantine put off his christening, as many people do their wills, till the day of his death, at NICOMEDIA:-but a trifling anachronism or transposition should give way to sentiments of veneration inspired by such a momentous event in the catholic, or rather the political history of the Church.

Heretic that I am, I acknowledge that an object in the front of St. John Lateran, called forth more profound meditations than the Baptistery of Constantine (whose character I never admired,) or the fabulous relics of our Saviour's eventful life and death! I say fabulous-for were there a single atom of probability or truth in the tales connected with these relics, I would be the first to fall down and worship them. But the venerable and gigantic obelisk of granite, hewn out of the solid rocks of the Nubian mountains, before the foundations of the Pyramids were laid, and dedicated to the SUN by RAMESES, King of Egypt, 3330 years ago, would attract the attention of the most apathetical observer, and call forth reflexions-if the materials of thought existed in his breast! The first question that suggests itself is what brought this stupendous piece of granite from Thebes to Rome? HISTORY, like a parrot, replies, CoNSTANTINE the Great, and CONSTANS the Second. I should be more inclined to say, that this colossal monument was carried to its present destination by that irresistible current of moral and physical energy-of arts and of arms-of wealth and of powerwhich has constantly, if not uniformly flowed from East to West, and from South to North, for forty centuries. Where are the fountains of empire which once descended with the streams of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Scamander, the Hellespont, the Tiber? They now glide through channels with harsher names-along the Rhone and the Seine-the Thames and the Oder-the Vistula and the Dwina! And has that

obelisk fixed its final residence where it now stands? May not some future CONSTANTINE, of the North or the West, seize on this venerable exile of Egypt, and drag it in chains to a still greater distance from the Court of Rameses-to the frozen banks of the Beresina-or to the stormy and wave-worn shores of that gloomy clime

Where seas embrace,

Dividing from the world the British race?

Yes! when the light of reason and knowledge, now dawning over the Apennines, shall have dispersed the dense vapour of superstitious thraldom, which still hangs over the seven hills, the temporal sceptre of the Church will be quietly inurned on the quirinal, and sleep in everlasting repose with the undistinguished ashes of the Cæsars, and the high priests of Jupiter -while the key of St. Peter will fall from the summit of Trajan's Pillar, (where it should never have been placed,) no more to unlock the gate of Heaven at the intercession or importunity of presumptuous man! And what shall then induce either gods or men to reside in the pestiferous atmosphere of the Campagna? Nothing. Man will move into a better air-he can scarcely find a worse; while the gods and demigods of antiquity will abandon, perhaps without much reluctance, the Capitol and the Vatican, to visit regions unknown to, or abhorred by, their original idolaters. The Belvidere Apollo, and the Medicean Venus, may not be the only divinities for whom “CHANGE of AIR" may be prescribed by some potent physician of future times! JUPITER may yet display his ambrosial curls in the Louvre, in modern Babylon, or in St. Petersburgh—Apollo may yet direct his arrows against the Caledonian boar, instead of the Pythian serpent-the labours of Hercules may not yet be finished-he may yet sail between the pillars which he formed as the boundaries of the world, and cross the Atlantic to a world of which he was ignorant-LAOCOON and his children (for priests in his days acknowledged their offspring) may yet writhe on the banks of the Bothnia, under the stupid gaze of Finland boors-while NIOBE and her family enact their daily tragedy in

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!