nuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy
soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side
foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high
caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little
bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns--the men who
mourned for Caesar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn
Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring
were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people
boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's
parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the
fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm.

All about stretches the vast humming city of low-built houses covering
the short steep hills and filling all the hollow between. Northeastward
lies the seething Suburra; the yellow river runs beyond the Velabrum and
the cattle market to the west; southward rise the enchanted palaces of
Caesar; due east is the Esquiline of evil fame, redeemed and made lovely
with trees and fountains by Maecenas, but haunted even today, say modern
Romans, by the spectres of murderers and thieves who there died bloody
deaths of quivering torture. All around, as the sun sinks and the cool
shadows quench the hot light on the white pavements, the ever-increasing
crowds of men--always more men than women--move inward, half
unconsciously, out of inborn instinct, to the Forum, the centre of the
Empire, the middle of the world, the boiling-point of the whole earth's
riches and strength and life.

Then as the traveller muses out his short space of rest, the vision
grows confused, and Rome's huge ghosts go stalking, galloping, clanging,
raving through the surging dream-throng,--Caesar, Brutus, Pompey,
Catiline, Cicero, Caligula, Vitellius, Hadrian,--and close upon them
Gauls and Goths and Huns, and all barbarians, till the dream is a medley
of school-learned names, that have suddenly taken shadows of great faces
out of Rome's shadow storehouse, and gorgeous arms and streaming
draperies, and all at once the sight-seer shivers as the sun goes down,
and passes his hand over his eyes, and shakes himself, and goes away
rather hastily, lest he should fall sick of a fever and himself be
gathered to the ghosts he has seen.

It matters very little whether the day-dream much resembles the reality
of ages long ago, whether