scitate the Rome of
history--the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty
of Greece, was certainly well able to create life. The emperors, the
philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as
they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their
deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their
features. And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful
wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past. Nothing,
indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the
history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the
teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in
horror. But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one
can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed
statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs--whether
the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr--evoke
the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.

* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
erroneous.--Trans.

At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra,
three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture.
"Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock,
and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father
sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really
lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him--who can tell? At
all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."

Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to
Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he
was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down,
and the _attache_ again began to talk of art.

How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed
royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world
converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the
outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be
acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of
neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished
magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth