and a mother wept
Tears of delight!"[Sec.]

And compare Shelley's _Poetical Works_, 1895, iii. 276--

"Rome has fallen; ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying."]

[Sec.] [At the words _Tu Marcellus eris, etc_. (_vide_ Tib. Cl. Donatus,
_Life of Virgil_ (Virg., _Opera_), Leeuwarden, 1627, vol. i.).]

[of]
----_wherein have creeped_
_The Reptiles which_.----
or, _Scorpion and blindworm_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[484] The Palatine is one mass of ruins, particularly on the side
towards the Circus Maximus. The very soil is formed of crumbled
brickwork. Nothing has been told--nothing can be told--to satisfy the
belief of any but the Roman antiquary. [The Palatine was the site of the
successive "Domus" of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, and of the
_Domus Transitoria_ of Nero, which perished when Rome was burnt. Later
emperors--Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Severus--added to the splendour
of the name-giving Palatine. "The troops of Genseric," says Hobhouse
(_Hist. Illust._, p. 206), "occupied the Palatine, and despoiled it of
all its riches... and when it again rises, it rises in ruins."
Systematic excavations during the last fifty years have laid bare much
that was hidden, and "learning and research" have in parts revealed the
"obliterated plan;" but, in 1817, the "shapeless mass of ruins" defied
the guesses of antiquarians. "Your walks in the Palatine ruins ... will
be undisturbed, unless you startle a fox in breaking through the
brambles in the corridors, or burst unawares through the hole of some
shivered fragments into one of the half-buried chambers, which the
peasants have blocked up to serve as stalls for their jackasses, or as
huts for those who watch the gardens" (_Hist. Illust._, p. 212).]

[485] {408} The author of the _Life of Cicero_, speaking of the opinion
entertained of Britain by that orator and his contemporary Romans, has
the following eloquent passage:--"From their railleries of this kind, on
the barbarity and misery of our island, one cannot help reflecting on
the surprising fate and revolutions of kingdoms; how Rome, once the
mistress of the world, the seat of arts, empire, and glory, now lies
sunk in sloth, ignorance, and poverty; enslaved to the most cruel as
well as to the most contemptible of tyrants, superstition and religious
imposture; while this remote country, anciently the jest and contempt of
the polite R