g obsequiously a
little to the rear. It was now high noon, and the crowd and bustle on
the Appian Way redoubled. This Queen of Roads[4] ran straight as an
arrow up-hill and down from Rome to Capua and Brundisium, a distance of
over three hundred miles. Though then nearly six hundred years old, it
was as firm as the day it was laid, and after the lapse of fifteen
hundred years more, during which "the Goth, the Christian, Time, War,
Flood and Fire," have devastated the land, its firm lava pavement of
broad basaltic slabs seems as enduring as ever. On every side rolled the
undulating Campagna, now a scene of melancholy desolation, then
cultivated like a garden, abounding in villas and mansions whose marble
columns gleamed snowy white through the luxuriant foliage of their
embosoming myrtle and laurel groves. On either side of the road were the
stately tombs of Rome's mighty dead-her pr[ae]tors, proconsuls, and
senators some, like the mausoleum of C[ae]cilia Metella,[5] rising like a
solid fortress; others were like little wayside altars, but all were
surrounded by an elegantly kept green sward, adorned with parterres of
flowers. Their ruins now rise like stranded wrecks above the sea of
verdure of the tomb-abounding plain. On every side are tombs--tombs
above and tombs below--the graves of contending races, the sepulchres of
vanished generations. Across the vast field of view stretched, supported
high in air on hundreds of arches, like a Titan procession, the Marcian
Aqueduct, erected B.C. 146, which after two thousand years brings to the
city of Rome an abundant supply of the purest water from the far distant
Alban Mountains, which present to our gaze to-day the same serrated
outline and lovely play of colour that delighted the eyes of Horace and
Cicero.

As they drew nearer the gates of the city, it became difficult to thread
their way through the throngs of eager travellers--gay lectic[ae] or
silken-curtained carriages and flashing chariots, conveying fashionable
ladies and the gilded gallants of the city to the elegant villas without
the walls--processions of consuls and proconsuls with their guards, and
crowds of peasants bringing in the panniers of their patient donkeys
fruits, vegetables, and even snow from the distant Soracte, protected
from the heat by a straw matting--just as they do in Italy to-day. The
busy scene is vividly described in the graphic lines of Milton:

"What conflux issuing forth or entering