lf suckled Romulus, this soil had
nourished a race of heroes. The road, so filled in former times by a
never-failing concourse of legions going forth to battle or returning in
triumph,--of consuls and legates bearing the high behests of the senate
to the subject provinces,--and of ambassadors and princes coming to sue
for peace, or to lay their tributary gifts at the feet of Rome,--is now
solitary and untrodden, save by the traveller from a far country, or the
cowled and corded pilgrim whose vow brings him to the shrine of the
apostles. Stacks of mouldering brickwork attract the eye by the
wayside,--the remains of temples and monuments when the land was in its
prime. You scarce take note of the scattered and stunted olives which
are dying through age. The fields are wretchedly tilled, where tilled at
all. The country appears to grow only the more desolate, and the silence
the more dreary and unsupportable, as you advance. "Roma! Roma!" is
chanted forth in melancholy tones by the postilion. "Roma" is graven on
the milestones; but you cannot persuade yourself that Rome you shall
find in the heart of a desert like this. You have gained the brow of a
low hill; you have passed the summit, and got half-way down the
declivity; when suddenly a vision bursts on your sight that rivets you
to the spot. There is the Tiber rolling its yellow floods at your feet;
and there, spread out in funereal gloom between the mountains and the
sea, is the CAMPAGNA DI ROMA. The spectacle is sublime, despite its
desolation. There is but one object in the vast expanse, but that is
truly a majestic one. Alone, on the silent plain, judgment-stricken and
sackcloth-clad, occupying the same spot where she "glorified herself and
lived deliciously," and said in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no
widow, and shall see no sorrow," is ROME.

You are to cross the Tiber. Already your steps are on the Pons Milvius,
where Christianity triumphed over Paganism in the person of Constantine,
and over the parapet of which Maxentius, in his flight, flung the
seven-branched golden candlestick, which Titus brought from the temple
of Jerusalem. The Flaminian way, which you are now to traverse, runs
straight to the gate of Rome. In front is the long line of the city
walls, within which you can descry the proud dome of St Peter's, the
huge rotundity of St Angelo, or "Hadrian's Mole," and a host of inferior
cupolas and towers, which in any other city would suffice to give a