he Pincian Gate and gained the Campus Martius; and
here the aspect of the besieged city and the condition of its doomed
inhabitants were fully and fearfully disclosed to view. On the surface
of the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to and
fro in every direction as their various destinations or caprices might
lead them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible. These few,
who still retained their strength or the resolution to pace the
greatest thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwards
incessantly, their hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands
pressed over their mouths; each separate, distrustful, and silent;
fierce as imprisoned madmen; restless as spectres disturbed in a place
of tombs.

Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and,
besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers of
the dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilence
which had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in its
work of desolation and death. Around the public fountains, where the
water still bubbled up as freshly as in the summer-time of prosperity
and peace, the poorer population of beleaguered Rome had chiefly
congregated to expire. Some still retained strength enough to drink
greedily at the margin of the stone basins, across which others lay
dead--their heads and shoulders immersed in the water--drowned from
lack of strength to draw back after their first draught. Children
mounted over the dead bodies of their parents to raise themselves to
the fountain's brim; parents stared vacantly at the corpses of their
children alternately floating and sinking in the water, into which they
had fallen unsuccoured and unmourned.

In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres and
hippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths
lay the discoloured bodies of those who had died ere they could reach
the fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded in
frightful contrast by the abandoned furniture of luxury and the
discarded inventions of vice--by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--by
jewelled cornices--by obscene picture and statues--by brilliantly
framed, gaudily tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging
at their accustomed places on the lofty marble walls. Farther on, in
the by-streets and the retired courts, where the corpse of the
tradesman was stretched on his empty cou