On the opposite side of the hill is the Forum. "It is difficult to conceive," says Mathews, " and impossible to describe, the effect produced by the admonitus locorum' of this memorable scene-reduced as it now is again to something like the state which Virgil describes in the days of Evander:"_

Passimque armenta videbant,

Romanoque Foro et lautis mugire Carinis.-ÆN. viii. 361.

They viewed the ground of Rome's litigious hall:
Once oxen lowed, where now the lawyers bawl.-Dryden.

The Roman Forum, though no longer the Papal Smithfield, still bears and merits the name of Campo Vaccino. "Yet," continues Mathews, "it is even now the finest walk in the world, and would hardly, perhaps, in the proudest days of its magnificence, have interested a spectator more than it does at present, fallen as it is from its high estate. Nothing can be more striking or more affecting than the contrast between what it was, and what it is. There is enough in the tottering ruins which yet remain to recall the history of its ancient grandeur; while its present misery and degradation are obtruded upon you at every step. Here Horace lounged; here Cicero harangued; and here now the modern Romans count their beads, cleanse their heads, and violate the sanctity of the place by every species of abomination.

"The walk from the Capitol to the Coliseum comprises the history of ages. The broken pillars that remain of the Temple of Concord, the Temple of Jupi

ter Tonans, and the Comitium, tell the tale of former times, in language at once the most pathetic and intelligible: it is a mute eloquence, surpassing all the powers of description. It would seem as if the destroying angel had a taste for the picturesque; for the ruins are left just as the painter would most wish to have them."

The arches of the emperors have been thought scarcely to harmonize with the rest of the scene; but such is the accumulation of soil around them, that it would be unfair to judge of their former effect from their present appearance. From the arch of Septimius Severus, a quadruple row of trees, crossing the Forum in an oblique direction, and leaving the Temples of Antoninus and Peace on the left, leads to that of Titus. This walk, the boasted work of the French, however convenient, is but ill-suited to the scene: it is a remnant of that perverted taste which formerly raised the "Orti Farnesi” among the ruins of the Palatine Hill, and introduced modern decoration into a spot where every thing that is modern appears profane.

This, the most populous part of ancient Rome, is now almost wholly abandoned. Mount Palatine, which originally contained all the Romans, and was afterwards found insufficient to accommodate one tyrant,

Long while the seat of Rome, hereafter found

Less than enough-so monstrous was the brood
Engendered there, so Titan-like-to lodge

One in his madness,

is at present inhabited only by a few friars; and it has

been observed, not unaptly, that what Virgil says of the Capitoline Hill would, were we but to reverse the expression, be equally applicable to the modern state of the Palatine:

Aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.-ÆN. viii. 348.

You may now traverse the whole hill, and scarcely meet a human being, and that, too, on a spot once crowded with the assembled orders of Rome and Italy *:.

On the road where once we might have met

Cæsar, and Cato, and men more than kings,

We meet, none else, the pilgrim and the beggar!

Raphael's villa, the Farnese summer-house, M. Angelo's aviaries, are all of them falling into the same desolation as the imperial palace itself, which fringes the mount with its broken arches.

"Would you push inquiry beyond these ruins, from the Palatium of Augustus back to the Palanteum of Evander, you find the mount surrounded with sacred names the altar of Hercules-the Ruminal fig-treethe Lupercal-the Germalus-the Velia; but would you fondly affix to each name its local habitation on the hill, contradiction and doubt will thicken as you remount+."

In travelling round the antiquities of Rome, there is,

* Totum Palatium senatu, equitibus Romanis, civitate omni, Italià cunctâ refertum.-Cicero.

+ Forsyth.

indeed, much room for scepticism with respect to the propriety of the names that have been applied to many of them. The Temple of Vesta, for example, at no great distance from the Palatine Hill, must be referred to this doubtful order. Its situation on the banks of the river seems to accord well enough with Horace's "monumenta Vestæ*"; and its position will agree with the "ventum erat ad Vestæ" of the ninth satire, where it is represented as lying beyond the Tiber, in the way from the Via Sacra to the gardens of Cæsar. Yet, observes Forsyth, "if you fix Vesta in this round temple on the Tiber, others will contend there for Hercules, or Portumnus, or Volupia. If, again, you assign the three magnificent columns in the Forum to Jupiter Stator, others will force them into a senate-house, or a portico, or a comitium, or a bridge. All round the Palatine, the Forum, the Velabrum, and the Sacred Way, is the favourite field of antiquarian polemics. On this field you may fight most learnedly at an easy rate: every inch of it has been disputed; every opinion may gain some plausibility, and whichever you adopt will find proofs ready marshalled in its defence:"

Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,

"here was, or is," where all is doubly night?-BYRON.

* It is objected, however, with some appearance of reason, that when Horace alludes to a flood of the Tiber, reaching even to the temple of Vesta, as a memorable occurrence, he can hardly mean this temple, which is on the very banks of the river.

225

WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC.

Reliquias veterumque vides monumenta virorum.-VIRG.

BUT few works of the kings have escaped the ravages of time, and those built in the Etruscan style; consisting of a few layers of peperine stone, observable in the remains of the Tullian walls, the Tullian prison, and the triple arch of the Cloaca Maxima. Yet these remains, composed of large uncemented but regular blocks, though confessedly insufficient to enable us to retrace the architectural designs of the first Romans, may serve as a specimen of their public masonry, and, in the opinion of some, afford a plain indication of their early ambition, "which thus projected from its very infancy an eternal city,' the capital of the world."

TULLIAN PRISON.-The remains of the Tullian prison stand at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, beneath the church of S. Pietro in Carcere. This prison was built by Ancus Martius, as we learn from Livy, who tells us that that king, "to repress the growing licentiousness, caused a prison to be constructed in the middle of the city, overlooking the Forum."-(Lib. i. c. 33). The subterranean part was added by Servius Tullius, and was thence called Tullianum. It was also denominated Robur; and if this is what Livy (Lib. xxxii. c. 26) means by the Carcer Lautumiarum-the prison of the stone

VOL I.