t death!" the wish of ferocious courage.
The pride or prudence of the Ursini restrained them from the field,
which was occupied by three of their hereditary rivals, whose
inscriptions denoted the lofty greatness of the Colonna name: "Though
sad, I am strong;" "Strong as I am great;" "If I fall," addressing
himself to the spectators, "you fall with me"--intimating (says the
contemporary writer) that while the other families were the subjects of
the Vatican, they alone were the supporters of the Capitol. The combats
of the amphitheatre were dangerous and bloody. Every champion
successively encountered a wild bull; and the victory may be ascribed to
the quadrupeds, since no more than eleven were left on the field, with
the loss of nine wounded and eighteen killed on the side of their
adversaries. Some of the noblest families might mourn; but the pomp of
the funerals in the churches of St. John Lateran and Sta. Maria Maggiore
afforded a second holiday to the people. Doubtless it was not in such
conflicts that the blood of the Romans should have been shed: yet in
blaming their rashness we are compelled to applaud their gallantry; and
the noble volunteers who display their magnificence and risk their lives
under the balconies of the fair, excite a more generous sympathy than
the thousands of captives and malefactors who were reluctantly dragged
to the scene of slaughter.

This use of the amphitheatre was a rare, perhaps a singular, festival:
the demand for the materials was a daily and continual want which the
citizens could gratify without restraint or remorse. In the fourteenth
century a scandalous act of concord secured to both factions the
privilege of extracting stones from the free and common quarry of the
Coliseum; and Poggius laments that the greater part of these stones had
been burnt to lime by the folly of the Romans. To check this abuse, and
to prevent the nocturnal crimes that might be perpetrated in the vast
and gloomy recess, Eugenius the Fourth surrounded it with a wall; and by
a charter long extant, granted both the ground and edifice to the monks
of an adjacent convent. After his death the wall was overthrown in a
tumult of the people; and had they themselves respected the noblest
monument of their fathers, they might have justified the resolve that it
should never be degraded to private property. The inside was damaged;
but in the middle of the sixteenth century, an era of taste and
learning, the exterior c