ible associations of schoolboy life.

When a joint city was thus compacted and called Rome--possibly its old
Pelasgic appellation--the first effort of the confederated settlements
was to drain the geological lake in the centre of the city into the
Tiber, a quarter of a mile distant. This they did by means of the
celebrated Cloaca Maxima, a part of which may be seen open at the
present day under the pavement of the Roman Forum, near the Temple of
Castor and Pollux. This common sewer of Rome is one of its oldest and
greatest relics. It was built by the first Tarquin, the fifth king of
Rome, a century and a half after the foundation of the city; and
although two thousand five hundred years have passed away since the
architect formed without cement its massive archway of huge volcanic
stones found on the spot, and during all the time it has been
subjected to the shock of numerous earthquakes, inundations of the
Tiber, and the crash of falling ruins, it still serves its original
purpose as effectually as ever, and promises to stand for as many ages
in the future as it has stood in the past. It is commonly said that we
owe the invention of the arch to the Romans; and this work of
undoubted Etruscan architecture is usually considered as among the
very first applications of the principle. But the arched drains and
doorways discovered by Layard at Nineveh prove that the Assyrians
employed the arch centuries before Rome was founded. It had however
only a subordinate place and a very limited application in the ancient
architecture of the East; and it was left to the Romans to give it due
prominence in crossing wide spaces, to make it "the bow of promise,"
the bridge over which they passed to the dominion of the world. The
Cloaca Maxima is a tunnel roofed with two concentric rings of enormous
stones, the innermost having an interior diameter of nearly fourteen
feet, the height being about twelve feet. So capacious was it that
Strabo mentions that a waggon loaded with hay might find room in it;
and it is recorded that the Consul Agrippa passed through it in a
boat. The mouth of the Cloaca opens into the Tiber, near the little
round temple of Hercules in the Forum Boarium; but it is often
invisible owing to the flooding of the river; and even when the Tiber
is low, so much has its bed been silted up that only about three feet
below the keystone of the sewer can be seen. Subsequently all the
sewers of Rome were connected with it; and