r the wearied traveller; a dead silence,
interrupted only by the sound of the wind which sweeps over the plain,
or the trickling of a natural fountain by the wayside; not a cottage nor
the curling of smoke to be seen; only here and there a cross on a
projecting eminence to mark the spot of a murder; and all this in gentle
slopes, dry and fertile plains, and up to the gates of great city."[17]
The sight of the long lines of ruined aqueducts traversing the deserted
Campagna, of the tombs scattered along the lines of the ancient
_chaussees_ across its dreary expanse, of the dome of St Peter's alone
rising in solitary majesty over its lonely hills, forcibly impress the
mind, and produce an impression which no subsequent events or lapse of
time are able to efface. At this moment the features of the scene, the
impression it produces, are as present to the mind of the writer as when
they were first seen thirty years ago.

But striking as these impressions are, the Roman Campagna is fraught
with instruction of a more valuable kind. It stands there, not only a
monument of the past, but a beacon for the future. It is fraught with
instruction, not only to the ancient but the modern world. The most
valuable lessons of political wisdom which antiquity has bequeathed to
modern times, are to be gathered amidst its solitary ruins.

In investigating the causes of this extraordinary desolation of a
district, in ancient times the theatre of such busy industry, and which,
for centuries, maintained so great and flourishing a rural population,
there are several observations to be made on the principle, as logicians
call it, of _exclusion_, in order to clear the ground before the real
cause is arrived at.

The first of these is, that the causes, whatever they are, which
produced the desolation of the Campagna, had begun to operate, and their
blasting effect was felt, in _ancient_ times, and long before a single
squadron of the barbarians had crossed the Alps. In fact, the Campagna
was a scene of active agricultural industry only so long as Rome was
contending with its redoubtable Italian neighbours--the Latins, the
Etruscans, the Samnites, and the Cisalpine Gauls. From the time that, by
the conquest of Carthage, they obtained the mastery of the shore of the
Mediterranean, _agriculture_ in the neighbourhood of Rome began to
decline. Pasturage was found to be a more profitable employment of
estates; and the vast supplies of grain, required fo