ations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of
their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto. It is hardly possible that his
glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he
sits his bronze charger--an extremely fat one--so majestically in the
piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble
equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.

A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of
chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the
monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the
nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of
Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out
where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving
through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I
looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty
antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with
their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal
grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my
veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no
arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the
reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed five
times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor's in the next piazza (at
Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost worn your new
clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus
Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a
strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round
from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having
a general effect in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the
dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune,
or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives
having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent
ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the
Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life
Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the
Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it is
housed on the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is
that I believe the Temple of Nept