ues
of the city; that, by the command of the Barbarian, the Palatine library
was reduced to ashes, and that the history of Livy was the peculiar
mark of his absurd and mischievous fanaticism. The writings of Gregory
himself reveal his implacable aversion to the monuments of classic
genius; and he points his severest censure against the profane learning
of a bishop, who taught the art of grammar, studied the Latin poets,
and pronounced with the same voice the praises of Jupiter and those of
Christ. But the evidence of his destructive rage is doubtful and recent:
the Temple of Peace, or the theatre of Marcellus, have been demolished
by the slow operation of ages, and a formal proscription would have
multiplied the copies of Virgil and Livy in the countries which were not
subject to the ecclesiastical dictator.

Like Thebes, or Babylon, or Carthage, the names of Rome might have been
erased from the earth, if the city had not been animated by a vital
principle, which again restored her to honor and dominion. A vague
tradition was embraced, that two Jewish teachers, a tent-maker and a
fisherman, had formerly been executed in the circus of Nero, and at
the end of five hundred years, their genuine or fictitious relics were
adored as the Palladium of Christian Rome. The pilgrims of the East and
West resorted to the holy threshold; but the shrines of the apostles
were guarded by miracles and invisible terrors; and it was not without
fear that the pious Catholic approached the object of his worship.
It was fatal to touch, it was dangerous to behold, the bodies of the
saints; and those who, from the purest motives, presumed to disturb the
repose of the sanctuary, were affrighted by visions, or punished with
sudden death. The unreasonable request of an empress, who wished to
deprive the Romans of their sacred treasure, the head of St. Paul,
was rejected with the deepest abhorrence; and the pope asserted, most
probably with truth, that a linen which had been sanctified in the
neighborhood of his body, or the filings of his chain, which it was
sometimes easy and sometimes impossible to obtain, possessed an equal
degree of miraculous virtue. But the power as well as virtue of the
apostles resided with living energy in the breast of their successors;
and the chair of St. Peter was filled under the reign of Maurice by the
first and greatest of the name of Gregory. His grandfather Felix had
himself been pope, and as the bishops were alre