cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial
affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all
the clocks were set once a fortnight to follow the sun.

Rome is restoring to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. They are much
bigger and finer things than the symmetrical, stuccoed cubes which have
lately been piled up everywhere in heaven-offending masses, and one is
glad to come back to them after the nightmare that has lasted twenty
years. Moreover, one is surprised to find how little permanent effect
has been produced by the squandering of countless millions during the
building mania, beyond a cruel destruction of trees, and a few
modifications of natural local accidents. To do the moderns justice,
they have done no one act of vandalism as bad as fifty, at least,
committed by the barons of the Middle Age and the Popes of the
Renascence, though they have shown much worse taste in such new things
as they have set up in place of the old.

The charm of Rome has never lain in its architecture, nor in the beauty
of its streets, though the loveliness of its old-fashioned gardens
contributed much which is now in great part lost. Nor can it be said
that the enthralling magic of the city we used to know lay especially in
its historical association, since Rome has been loved to folly by
half-educated girls, by flippant women of the world and by ignorant
idlers without number, as well as by most men of genius who have ever
spent much time there.

[Illustration: COLUMN OF PHOCAS, LOOKING ALONG THE FORUM]

In the Middle Age one man might know all that was to be known. Dante
did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediaeval
scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We
cannot all be archaeologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum
we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old
buildings; we know the Portico of the Twelve Gods in Council, the Temple
of Concord, the Basilica Julia, the Court of Vesta, the Temple of Castor
and Pollux; we have a more vague notion of the Senate Hall; the hideous
arch of Septimius Severus stares us in the face; so does the lovely
column of evil Phocas, the monster of the east, the red-handed
centurion-usurper who murdered an Emperor and his five sons to reach the
throne. And perhaps we have been told where the Rostra stood, and the
Rostra Julia, and that the queer fragment of maso