the city over which Pius IX looked out from his windows had been built up of materials conveyed from palaces, temples, market-places, theatres, baths, and a thousand other monuments. But, while Mediæval Rome, quitting the Palatine and Cælian, had slipped into the Campus Martius, it had left the Forum, the Circus Maximus, the Septizonium of Severus, and the Colosseum a world of ruins in one vast solitude, the dust of which attained in some places the height of thirty feet. This strange spectral kingdom of the inane hovered like a ghost on the confines of the later city; and to it the year 1870 came as an era of resurrection.

Something had been attempted in the way of recovery when Napoleon called his son King of Rome. But now much more was possible. The Rostra of Julius Cæsar, and the fragments of that altar where his body was burnt and Mark Antony harangued the people; certain portions of the Temple of Vesta, in which was kept the eternal fire; the House or Convent of the Vestals, with their statues, and with inscriptions still legible upon them; the Regia, or Chapter House, of the Pontifex Maximus, close to the Via Sacra; much, likewise, that was hidden within the depths of the Palatine, including vestiges of the Roma Quadrata which has been ascribed to Romulus; and now, it would appear, the lapis niger, memorial tomb of the King who had gone up to the gods, and who was worshipped as Quirinus-these are by no means all the spoils which the Forum and the adjacent Hills have yielded. The Mound, or Agger, of Tullius has been made accessible; an Etruscan cemetery opened on the Esquiline; and countless early tombs and mural paintings laid bare. Nor has any recent discovery more excited or charmed archæologists than the revelation, suspected by Fergusson, but proved beyond a doubt in 1892 by M. Chedanne, that the existing Pantheon, with its wonderful dome, dates from Hadrian and not from Agrippa. It is certainly a work of that Renaissance which during three decades of our second century filled the capital with noble specimens of Greek or Eastern architecture.*

Before these changes took place, an eminent historian, Gregorovius, had begun his chronicle of the City of Rome as it was during the Middle Ages. Its classic remains have occupied the pens of a crowd of students, among whom Signor Lanciani holds a conspicuous rank. The accomplished Cambridge scholar, Mr. (afterwards Professor) J. H. Middleton, has enabled us, in a work of singular clearness and exhaustive knowledge, to trace

* Dennie, 153, 278.

the Roman buildings from their foundation. Mr. Dennie's picturesque volume is intended for the average American pilgrim to Europe. Finally, Mr. Crawford has put together a brilliant mosaic, on a plan neither historical nor antiquarian, which does, we think, add a touch of life and romance to more technical treatment. His subject is Rome itself, considered as the Genius Loci; and it shall be ours.

Rome, in the phrase of Montesquieu, is the 'Spirit of Laws.' Massive and stately, majestic but artificial-these terms describe her monuments, literature, and government. Mr. Crawford dwelis on the characteristic which he terms 'gigantism'-or megalomania turned to stone-from which the Roman builders have never freed themselves. It is the mood in which were conceived and executed designs quite superhuman, such as Nero's Golden House, the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Mole of Hadrian, and his Villa at Tivoli, the Circus Maximus, the Septizonium, the Baths of Titus, Caracalla, Diocletian, and Constantine, the Tor de' Conti, St. Peter's and the Vatican, and, in our day of small things, that monstrous edifice, the Ministry of Finance. Surely this is an amazing succession. Yet these buildings of the giants, from which cities have been dug out and limekilns fed with precious marble during scores of years, are but samples, which the antiquary sees in a space formerly crowded with erections equal or greater, though now no more, If we would

area.

inflict on our historical vision the whole of what Rome has been, we must travel with Professor Middleton round its deserted The imagination, robust as it may deem itself at starting, will faint before it has come to the end. It cannot hold out against a spectacle so bewildering; it will be wearied with a monotonous infinitude. For the first and last word is vastness. The name of the city, which some have thought to mean 'strength,' is echoed over and over again in its palaces, theatres, market-places, porticoes, thermæ, aqueducts, walls, roads, arches, temples, shrines, prisons, fortresses-nay, in its private dwellinghouses, which only cannon would reduce were they manned for defence. There have been nine Romes,' said Ampère. We are looking on the tenth, and 'gigantism' prevails in it as in its predecessors. Be the sovereign who he may, to build up pull down is the burden laid upon him. In presence of ruins so enormous, any monument less than colossal must appear insignificant and mean.

and

Professor Middleton lets us into the secret of these nine Romes and their piling up skyward. The materials lay ready at hand, furnished by Nature in her geological processes-the alluvial, marine, and volcanic deposits that have hardened into

the yellow sand-stone of the Janiculum; dusty tufa from the hills; travertine, which is limestone under the action of water; and, above all, into that Roman cement, which outwears time and defies fire. Without this 'hydraulic' mixture, no buildings could have been projected with the incredibly great span of dome which we perceive, for instance, in the Baths of Caracalla, and which is imitated on so magnificent a scale in St. Peter's. Rome is built, one may say, of pozzolana, rather than of the granites, porphyries, and Eastern or African marbles which were brought from afar to adorn its constructions. Every architect, Etruscan, Greek, Græco-Roman, Byzantine, Mediæval, Renaissance, has built of materials found on the spot, and the later do but make a noble or a base employment of what the earlier has furnished to them; so that Rome may be read in its architecture, as a classic composition beneath the monkish Latin of a palimpsest. From the age of the Seven Kings comparatively little remains. The scarped cliff and wall of Romulus, the Tullianum, since baptised under the style of the Mamertine Prison, the Cloaca Maxima, and the Agger, begun by Tarquin the Old, finished by Servius-we are still amazed at the strength and solidity of these. For nine hundred years the city needed no defence except that which the Etruscan dynasty set up. Then came Aurelian, whose fortified ramparts survived to no small extent, until the cannon of the Italian army and the pick of the commercial architect laid parts of them low. The old town, built of crude brick and friable tufa, did not last beyond the early days of the Empire. Augustus, according to the wellknown saying, made of Rome a marble city. Yet repeated fires raged in its narrow streets, where the houses overhung the causeway and almost touched, as in a medieval borough, with their projecting fronts. But the greatest clearance was executed, if we may believe Tacitus, by Nero, when he burnt deliberately some three out of the fourteen regions, to make room for his Golden House, and probably also to fulfil the scheme of rebuilding on which he had set his heart. From this period Regal Rome was a mere memory, some few vestiges of which were preserved as relics of an uncivilised but heroic past.†

The Ancyrean inscription, reproduced by Professor Middleton, shows on what a splendid scale of harmony, no less than of magnitude, Augustus carried out his design of beautifying the Forum, Capitol, and Palatine, while extending his great ancestor's work, the Basilica Julia, and adding thereto the

* Middleton, i, 9–77. Vol. 191.-No. 381.

D

† Ibid., 89.

Heroon, or temple of Cæsar. It was the best period in Roman art, refined or elevated under Hellenic guidance, its execution largely entrusted to Greeks. The city grew into a museum, rich with spoils beyond reckoning. Not even yet are they exhausted, whether above ground or in the subterranean drift and débris which have yielded up so many treasures of marble, bronze, gold, incised gems, and mural paintings-the latter doomed almost inevitably to perish on contact with the open air. Long after Augustus, when the capital had been plundered again and again, a thousand marble statues, we are told, were burnt into lime by the degenerate Romans. The Vandals who followed Genseric in 455, and the Jews of Trastevere, says Mr. Crawford, melted down all they could lay hands upon of the four thousand bronze statues left from Imperial times.t Constans II carried off in 663 a world of antiquities which never arrived at Byzantium. He was less fortunate than the first Christian Emperor, who had adorned his New Rome with the trophies of the Old. Yet the Vatican galleries have still a collection of statuary which is the largest in Europe, and most of it is classic. The Capitol boasts a second museum: a third is lodged in the Baths of Diocletian: a fourth in the Lateran. When Virgil wrote 'rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,' the great city deserved his admiration; but so universal a presence of beautiful things within it must not lead us to imagine that they were products of the native genius.

Rome conquered art as she overthrew the nations and took their gods captive. She had no skill of her own in these finer effects; but she could set up a Pantheon which symbolised her all-devouring unity. The Augustan Age did not last beyond Nero. His Golden House brought within its enormous dimensions a new collection of paintings, sculptures, and curios; it became the prison of art,' for many besides the works of that Fabullus whom Pliny touches in his epigram. But a baser period was setting in. The Flavian Emperors built, as we may say, on Cyclopean standards. Their Colosseum was

6

immense rather than beautiful: so too were the Palace which Domitian erected, the Capitoline Jupiter restored by him, and the Temple to his father Vespasian. Even Hadrian, that most interesting modern,' as Mr. Dennie calls him, was a lover of huge and Egyptian-like buildings. His mighty Mausoleum reigns in the sky of Rome; during nine hundred or a thousand years it has served as a barracks and a fortress. The rotunda of the Pantheon declares, by its brick-stamps, his authorship, † Crawford, i, 96.

* Middleton, i, 381-387.

and was perhaps the crowning work of Apollodorus, the architect of that Forum which Trajan began and which Hadrian completed; therein was to be found the most splendid group of buildings in the Imperial city.* But the Temple of Venus and Rome, due likewise to this art-loving Emperor, has all but disappeared, leaving where it stood an empty platform. The temple of Faustina recalls Antoninus Pius: the Emperor Marcus survives in his equestrian statue, and his column rises above the Piazza Colonna. Severus, it is thought, raised the Septizonium, or 'Seven Stories,' to dazzle the Numidian pilgrims, his fellow-countrymen, as they first caught sight of the city. But all, from this time forward, becomes mere weight and rudeness of impression. To decorate his triumphal arch, Constantine annexed the bas-reliefs from Trajan's Forum. Henceforth, Rome was to be laid waste by its rulers or its people. The Barbarians have left a name in history which they did not deserve; and to this day we talk of Goths and Vandals, where we should see the Romans pulling down what their ancestors had built up.

On this head Gregorovius is indignant and persuasive; but we need not quote him, for Lanciani has made ample admission to the same effect. There is no longer any doubt,' says the latter, that the Romans have done more harm to their own city than all the invading hosts put together. The action of centuries and of natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and inundations, could not have done what men have accomplished knowingly and deliberately.'t The Barbarians had no instruments with which to achieve this enormous destruction. Alaric, indeed, laid waste the gardens and the house of Sallust. Genseric stripped its bronze roof from the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Vitiges tore down the aqueducts. But it was the defenders of Sant' Angelo that hurled upon the army led by Vitiges the marble statues which decorated Hadrian's gigantic sepulchre. Romans quarried the Circus Maximus— which under Trajan was perhaps the most conspicuous of the city monuments, covered inside and out,' says Middleton,' with white marble, relieved with gold and painting, brilliant mosaics, columns of coloured Oriental marbles, and statues of white marble and gilt bronze'-quarried it until it was destroyed even to the foundations and not a vestige of it left. Romans bought or sold the right of pulling down the Colosseum; and in 1452 the contractor, Giovanni Foglia, took away thence two thousand five hundred and twenty-two cartloads of travertine ‡

Dennie, 279.

† Dennie, 275.

Ibid., 226-276.