une would have been superior to either
fate; though I may be mistaken.

Ruin, nearly everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the
environment; and even the monuments of the past which are in
comparatively good repair have not always the keeping that the past
would probably have chosen for them. One that suffers as little as any,
if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch you are
apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside it or across
its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with post-card boys and their
bargains. In spite of them, the sight of the temple does mightily lift
the heart; and though you may have had, as I had, forty-odd years to
believe in it, you must waver in doubt of its reality whenever you see
it. It seems too great to be true, standing there in its immortal
sublimity, the temple of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the
saints by Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration
equally as classic or catholic. It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in
the very latest edition of Murray's _Handbook_ as "the best-preserved
monument of ancient Rome"; worthy the praise of the fastidious and
difficult Hare as "the most perfect pagan building in the city"; worthy
whatever higher laud my unconsulted Baedeker bestows upon it. But I
speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if he comes upon
it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its vast bronze doors
closing against him until three o'clock; there are many sadder things in
life than not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all
gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the
Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor
Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise
the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks
down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the
visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to
fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely relieve.

I proved the fact by successive visits; but, after all my content with
the outside of the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome
is not the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building,
but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get this
in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine Hill, but you
get something more nearly like it t