involved in the ruin
of the Roman Empire; but when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the
waste of ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather
than our losses, are the objects of my surprise. Many curious and
interesting facts are buried in oblivion; the three great historians of
Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a mutilated state, and we are
deprived of many pleasing compositions of the lyric, iambic, and
dramatic poetry of the Greeks. Yet we should gratefully remember that
the mischances of time and accident have spared the classic works to
which the suffrage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of genius
and glory; the teachers of ancient knowledge who are still extant had
perused and compared the writings of their predecessors; nor can it
fairly be presumed that any important truth, any useful discovery in art
or nature, has been snatched away from the curiosity of modern ages.

[Illustration: _RUINED ROME._
From a Photograph.
TEMPLE OF ROMULUS
BASILICA OF CONSTANTINE
COLOSSEUM
ARCH OF TITUS]

THE FINAL RUIN OF ROME

In the last days of Pope Eugenius the Fourth, two of his servants, the
learned Poggius and a friend, ascended the Capitoline Hill, reposed
themselves among the ruins of columns and temples, and viewed from that
commanding spot the wide and various prospect of desolation. The place
and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of
fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which
buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that in
proportion to her former greatness the fall of Rome was the more awful
and deplorable. "Her primeval state, such as she might appear in a
remote age, when Evander entertained the stranger of Troy, has been
delineated by the fancy of Virgil. This Tarpeian Rock was then a savage
and solitary thicket; in the time of the poet it was crowned with the
golden roofs of a temple; the temple is overthrown, the gold has been
pillaged, the wheel of fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the
sacred ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles. The hill of
the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman Empire,
the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the
footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of
so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how
changed! how defaced