d in cars from the Capitol
through the Forum to the circus. In front of the Basilica Julia, and
on the opposite side of the way, so numerous were the statues which
Julius Caesar contrived to crowd together, that the Emperor
Constantine, during his famous visit to Rome, is said to have been
almost stupefied with amazement. Some such feeling is produced in our
own minds when we reflect that the bewildering array of sculptures in
the Roman galleries, admired by a concourse of pilgrims from every
country, are but chance discoveries, unnoticed by history, and of no
account in their own time. What must have been the feast of splendour
of which these are but the crumbs!

Perhaps the most beautiful of the ruins of the Forum are the three
marble columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux near the Basilica
Julia. They are the only prominent objects on the south-west side of
the Forum, and at once arrest the eye by their matchless symmetry and
grace. Time has dealt very hardly with them, battering their shapely
columns and rich Corinthian capitals, and discolouring their pure
white Pentelic marble. But it has not succeeded in destroying their
wonderful beauty; and the russet hues with which they have been
stained by the long lapse of the ages have rather added to them the
charm of antique picturesqueness. They rest upon a huge mound of
broken masonry, in the interstices of which Nature has sown her seeds
of minute life, which spread over it a tender pall of bright
vegetation. The three columns are bound together by iron rods, and
still further kept in position by the fragments of architrave and
cornice supported by them. They are forty-eight feet in height and
nearly five feet in diameter, while their flutings are nine inches
across. Around the basement a large quantity of broken columns,
capitals, and pedestals has been disinterred, some of which have
acquired an historic renown on account of the purposes which they have
served in the fine arts. Michael Angelo converted one huge fragment
into the pedestal of the celebrated bronze equestrian statue of Marcus
Aurelius, which he transferred from its original site in front of the
Arch of Septimius Severus, where it had stood for thirteen or fourteen
centuries, to the front of the Capitol; while out of another fragment
Raphael carved the well-known statue of Jonah sitting on a whale, to
be seen in the Chigi Chapel of Sta. Maria del Popolo, the only piece
of sculpture executed by the