d with the actual destruction of any
buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to
Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of
Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and
accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the
ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient
Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from
Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way
towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman
hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian
were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.

But the barons of mediaeval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction
which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the
basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome
have had to suffer. The mediaeval barons simply did according to their
kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings
or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one
purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic
destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of
Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and
their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may
have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews.
Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace
raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line--

"Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?

And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of
the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same
evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so
sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age
of the _Renaissance_, the time when men turned away from all reverence
for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the
feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times
when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed.
Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand
or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed
to admire and imitate. And when they did not actuall