e landed, built into its walls. A temple of Diana and
a temple of the Nymphs also adorned the town, from which numerous
columns and sculptures have been recently recovered. On every side the
apostle would see mournful tokens that the city was wholly given up to
idolatry,--to the worship of mortal men and an ignoble crowd of gods
and goddesses borrowed from all nations; and yet he had equally sad
proofs that the idolatry was altogether a hollow and heartless
pretence,--that the superstitious creed publicly maintained by the
city had long ceased to command the respect of its recognised
defenders.

I walked up from the town along the remains of the Via Campana, a
cross-road that led from Puteoli to Capua and there joined the famous
Appian Way. Along this road the apostle passed on his way to Rome; and
it is still paved with the original lava-blocks upon which his feet
had pressed. One of the principal objects on the way is the
amphitheatre of Nero, with its tiers of seats, its arena, and its
subterranean passages, in a wonderful state of preservation, richly
plumed with the delicate fronds of the maiden-hair fern, which drapes
with its living loveliness so many of the ruins of Greece and Italy.
It was here that Nero himself rehearsed the parts in which he wished
to act on the more public stage of Rome. The sands of the arena were
dyed with the blood of St. Januarius, who was thrown to the wild
beasts by order of Diocletian, and whose blood is annually liquefied
by a supposititious miracle in Naples at the present day. Behind the
amphitheatre the apostle would get a glimpse of the famous Phlegraean
Fields so often referred to in the classic poets as the scene of the
wars of the gods and the giants.

This is the Holy Land of Paganism. All the scenery of the eleventh
book of the _Odyssey_ and of the sixth book of the _AEneid_ spreads
beneath the eye. At every step you come upon some spot associated with
the romantic literature of antiquity. From thence the imaginative
shapes of Greek mythology passed into the poetry of Rome. There
everything takes us back far beyond the birth of Roman civilisation,
and reminds us of the legends of the older Hellenic days, which will
exercise an undying spell on the higher minds of the human race down
to the latest ages. It is the land of Virgil, whose own tomb is not
far off; and under the guidance of his genius we visit the ghostly
Cimmerian shores, now bathed in glowing sunshine, and stan