fatal to his reunion with the other. The churchmen were
gone.

Sufficiently punished for his curiosity by his disappointment, the
bailiff walked doggedly off towards the Pincian Hill. Had he turned in
the contrary direction, towards the Basilica of St. Peter, he would
have found himself once more in the neighbourhood of the landholder and
his remarkable friend, and would have gained that acquaintance with the
subjects of their conversation, which we intend that the reader shall
acquire in the course of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 4.

THE CHURCH.

In the year 324, on the locality assigned by rumour to the martyrdom of
St. Peter, and over the ruins of the Circus of Nero, Constantine
erected the church called the Basilica of St. Peter.

For twelve centuries, this building, raised by a man infamous for his
murders and his tyrannies, stood uninjured amid the shocks which during
that long period devastated the rest of the city. After that time it
was removed, tottering to its base from its own reverend and
illustrious age, by Pope Julius II, to make way for the foundations of
the modern church.

It is towards this structure of twelve hundred years' duration, erected
by hands stained with blood, and yet preserved as a star of peace in
the midst of stormy centuries of war, that we would direct the reader's
attention. What art has done for the modern church, time has effected
for the ancient. If the one is majestic to the eye by its grandeur,
the other is hallowed to the memory by its age.

As this church by its rise commemorated the triumphant establishment of
Christianity as the religion of Rome, so in its progress it reflected
every change wrought in the spirit of the new worship by the ambition,
the prodigality, or the frivolity of the priests. At first it stood
awful and imposing, beautiful in all its parts as the religion for
whose glory it was built. Vast porphyry colonnades decorated its
approaches, and surrounded a fountain whose waters issued from the
representation of a gigantic pine-tree in bronze. Its double rows of
aisles were each supported by forty-eight columns of precious marble.
Its flat ceiling was adorned with beams of gilt metal, rescued from the
pollution of heathen temples. Its walls were decorated with large
paintings of religious subjects, and its tribunal was studded with
elegant mosaics. Thus it rose, simple and yet sublime, awful and yet
alluring; in this its beginning, a type