ubject
kingdoms, adorned its sides. The whole region was resplendent with all
the pomp and luxury of paganism in its proudest hour; the word
"ambition," which came ultimately to signify all strivings for
eminence, resolving itself into the elementary meaning of a walk round
the Roman Forum, canvassing for votes at municipal elections.

Thus the Forum continued until the decay of the empire, when hordes of
invaders buried its magnificence in ruins. At the beginning of the
seventh century it must have been open and comparatively free from
_debris_, as is proved by the fact that the column of Phocas, erected,
at that time, stood on the original pavement. Virgil says, in his
account of the romantic interview of Evander with AEneas on the spot
which was to be afterwards Rome--then a quiet pastoral scene, green
with grass, and covered with bushes--that they saw herds of cattle
wandering over the Forum, and browsing on the rich pasture around the
shores of its blue lake. Strange, the law of circularity, after the
lapse of two thousand years, brought round the same state of things in
that storied spot. During the middle ages the Roman Forum was known
only as the Campo Vaccino, the field of cattle. It was a forlorn
waste, with a few ruins scattered over it, and two formal rows of
poplar-trees running down the middle of it, and wild-eyed buffaloes
and mouse-coloured oxen from the Campagna wandering over the solitude,
and cropping the grass and green weeds that grew in the very heart of
old Rome. When Gibbon conceived the idea of the _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_, listening to the vespers of the Franciscan friars
in the dim church of Ara Coeli in the neighbourhood, the Forum was an
unsightly piece of ground, covered with rubbish-heaps, with only a
pillar or two emerging from the general filth. When Byron stood beside
the "nameless column with the buried base," commemorated in _Childe
Harold_, he little dreamt what a rich collection of the relics of
imperial times lay under his feet, as completely buried by the wrecks
of ages as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the ashes and lava of
Vesuvius. From fifteen to twenty feet of soil had accumulated over
them.

The work of excavation was begun seventy-five years ago by the Duchess
of Devonshire, who spent the last years of her life in Rome, and
formed the centre of its brilliant society. Napoleon III., the late
Emperor of the French, carried on the task thus auspiciously
commenc