other attacks,
again and again repeated, they had been favoured by fortune to be some
slight evidence of that infinite grandeur which nothing could entirely
extingish. But it was likely that these disfigured remains were the
least entitled to attention, and that the enemies of that immortal
renown, in their fury, had addressed themselves in the first instance to
the destruction of what was most beautiful and worthiest of preservation;
and that the buildings of this bastard Rome, raised upon the ancient
productions, although they might excite the admiration of the present
age, reminded him of the crows' and sparrows' nests built in the walls
and arches of the old churches, destroyed by the Huguenots. Again, he
was apprehensive, seeing the space which this grave occupied, that the
whole might not have been recovered, and that the burial itself had been
buried. And, moreover, to see a wretched heap of rubbish, as pieces of
tile and pottery, grow (as it had ages since) to a height equal to that
of Mount Gurson,--[In Perigord.]--and thrice the width of it, appeared to
show a conspiracy of destiny against the glory and pre-eminence of that
city, affording at the same time a novel and extraordinary proof of its
departed greatness. He (Montaigne) observed that it was difficult to
believe considering the limited area taken up by any of her seven hills
and particularly the two most favoured ones, the Capitoline and the
Palatine, that so many buildings stood on the site. Judging only from
what is left of the Temple of Concord, along the 'Forum Romanum', of
which the fall seems quite recent, like that of some huge mountain split
into horrible crags, it does not look as if more than two such edifices
could have found room on the Capitoline, on which there were at one
period from five-and-twenty to thirty temples, besides private dwellings.
But, in point of fact, there is scarcely any probability of the views
which we take of the city being correct, its plan and form having changed
infinitely; for instance, the 'Velabrum', which on account of its
depressed level, received the sewage of the city, and had a lake, has
been raised by artificial accumulation to a height with the other hills,
and Mount Savello has, in truth, grown simply out of the ruins of the
theatre of Marcellus. He believed that an ancient Roman would not
recognise the place again. It often happened that in digging down into
earth the workmen came upon the crown o