s
number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is
the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities,
pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their
destroying will.

In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other
cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city
itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome
is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts
of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in
common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and
of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond
both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field
of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city
largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part
of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no
space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine,
Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been
spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined
fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a
Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre
of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia;
above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of
Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point
a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the
utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of
Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive
transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most
living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at
such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the
days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which
adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is
a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the
Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at
work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work
in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is
only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And
wretched as with one great exception is their st