Rome in its many Aspects.

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the school of the great masters of the painter's art, whose genius in its works of perfected beauty and expression has since distanced all approach, and arrested all farther advance.

To others, Rome is St Peter's, the city of the Popes, the centre of the pomps, state, and solemnities of Romish worship, the seat of the spiritual sovereignty that assumed to control Christendom, that once startled Europe as it fulminated and shook kings from their thrones.

To the pilgrim who journeys with staff and scallop from afar, Rome is the holy city, the depository of the relics enshrined for the adoration of the faithful, and the fountainhead of the indulgences, that loosen souls from purgatory and lighten the burden from the shoulders of the evil doer.

To the prophetic student, Rome is the Babylon foredoomed of God, the central seat of the predicted apostasy, "that great city that is clothed in fine linen, purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and that in one hour is to come to nought."

And not least prominently, at this moment, Rome is the puzzle of the diplomatists of Europe; the vexation, the plague, and the problem of the French Emperor; the hoped-for prey of the young Italian eagle, already spreading out its wings, flapping, hovering over it, and impatient to pounce upon it as the longed-for seat of the new united Italian kingdom.

In all these aspects, Rome is a study for the traveller, and in all it is complete in its circle of objects for the purposes of the student. The minds that sit down to their study may touch at few points, may clash at many, but in this they harmonize, their felt acknowledged magical interest in the city where they have so strangely met, and in which more strangely they realise their respective, though it may be most opposite, dreams of life. Once across the Alps, the spell of the great city is around the student, and neither the gay plains of Lombardy, nor the minor Paris of Milan, nor the once queenly city of the Adriatic, nor Florence set in its amphitheatre of beauty, and sparkling amidst its newly acquired royal honours, can lure him from his Romeward destination. Onward he urges his impatient way till the Alban hills, and nearer still the dome of St Peter's swelling on his sight, announce he is about to enter the "eternal city."

If, throughout all periods of her history, Rome has won from the hearts of men her title to the Imperial City, never has the homage paid to her, if tested by the conflux of travellers from all lands, been greater than at this hour. In spite of the signs of her speedily disappearing from her place in the circle of European powers, the tide of travellers

rolls undiminished along the Appian way,the scholar, the osoldier, the archaeologist, the Christian antiquarian, the painter, the sculptor, the protestant polemic, the interpreter of prophecy, the practical statesman, earnest only in interpreting events for the work of the day, all throng to this capital of ages to confess, though not as the Romanist confesses, and not according to his meaning, that to Rome belongs a spiritual sovereignty. London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, have their material good things. But they do not wield the sovereignty over men's spirits of the city of the seven hills. They cannot throw around themselves the mysterious charm of that city of all ages, from whose root life has sprung so much of the life we live.

And yet, like her own great temple of St Peter's, no city disappoints more at a first view, or has drawn forth a greater variety of judgments. Her many-sided character provokes this diversity. Rome is according to the eye that looks upon her. There are Englishmen who have thought they had exhausted the city of Rome in a week, and who, in recompence of their travel of a thousand miles, have carried away in their note-book the interesting facts, that its streets were odious with vegetable refuse, and perilous to the pedestrian, from want of a footpath. An English lady, with whom we conversed during a winter spent there, had evidently set her heart, as the great attraction to her of Rome, on seeing the Pope kiss his own toe, and anxiously inquired of us, without the slightest sense of the absurdity of the question, at what hour she should go to St Peter's to witness the ceremony. The idea was so supremely ludicrous of the old gentleman, Il sancta padre," being engaged in such nursery sports, though one could wish he were never more mischievously employed, that we fear we were not altogether polite in replying that the pope was now too stout a gentleman to go through, with ease to himself, that ceremony, and that she might dispense with her visit to St Peter's.'

Even the extent of the intelligence of a traveller will often prove at first the source of his greater disappointment with Rome. If his imagination has been filled with the past of the city of the Caesars, he will have pictured to himself an architectural magnificence, or a ruined grandeur, which the city of the popes will not satisfiy. Let him not be surprised, as he stands for the first time amidst the fallen temples and broken columns of the Forum, if the scene fail to realise the glory that has passed away, or should he even turn disappointed from the sight. One lesson we advise the traveller to accept from the Romish Church, though he refuse all after submission to her teaching. She has long

2021 as rom The Colosseums duos son

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known, in her depth of insight into man's nature, that relics, be they of saints or of heroes, of empires (or of peoples, do not depend on their bulk or their beauty for the impression they awaken. If Rome papal cannot get the body of a St Catherine, a St Sebastian, a St John, or of a Virgin Mary, she will be satisfied with a limb; if she cannot get a limb, she will accept of a bone; if she cannot get a bone, she will rejoice in a tooth, in a drop of blood, in a nail, in a lock of thair, in any fragment of the dress of the venerated saint, seven in a link of the chain that bound him, or in the most infinitesimal subdivision of the knapkin that wiped the sweat from his brow. It knows that the smallest object of sense gives wings to the imagination, and becomes the nucleus around which the devotions of the faithful rally. In spite of a first disappointing impression from the shrunk proportions of the historic relics of Rome, let the traveller only suffer himself day after day to be drawn towards them, and funconsciously he will find himself interweaving around even these shattered pavements, broken columns, and rude fragments of stripped and naked brickwork, the social and political life of the old masters of the world, and communing with the most illustrious of the names of which Roman history has to boast.

There is one ruin that disappoints no one, that greatest and best known of all the ruins, the seething centre of the life of ancient Rome, the pride and glory of the modern city,the Colosseum; and it is the one ruin that needs no reconstruction. Most of the ruins of ancient Rome, like the bones out of which Cuvier presented to the wondering eyes of the naturalists of Europe the forms of long extinct animal races, require to be reconstructed in order to be understood. But never did the Colosseum tell its tale of the past with a deeper moral or more touching pathos than -now. Spoiled by successive invaders, shaken by earthquakes, swept by tempests, turned into a quarry by the cupidity of popes and princes, and reduced by nearly an entire storey, dug away from its walls as from some mountain of travertine, to build up the Cancellaria, the Farnese, the Barberini palaces, never was it grander or more beautiful than now. To restore were to deface it. It needs no architect to repair it. The wild flowers have supplied a covering to its ruins, and a shade to the original defects of its architecture. As they have crept around the rough walls, and climbed the broken arcades, they have dropped their seeds and hung their leaves everywhere, till they have thrown over the stupendous old pile the freshness of a second life, and draped its grey in vivid green. The flora of the Colosseum

itself is a volume, with its four hundred accurately described and classified plants. We have often wished, as we wandered over that shapeless city of ruins, the Baths of Caracalla, that we could reproduce its past, with the life that once circulated through its now silent enclosure. Its reconstruction would shew in miniature the life of the great old city, with all the expedients and arts of its loungers to kill time. Its present huge, formless bulk, straggling over more than a mile in extent, does need to be interpreted. It is a mightymaze, and all without a plan. But the Colosseum needs no interpreter. You can complete at a glance, if you will, its four-storied ellipse, with all their diversity of orders, till you have stretched over the roofless fabric the huge valarium or awning that screened from a too fervid sun, yet did not abate the ferocity of the old lords of the world, as they drank deep under that shade of what was redder than wine, and more purple than the juice of the grape. Who wishes the Colosseum, as it was reared by Titus, to reappear? We envy not the Roman who saw it as storey after storey was piled on its gigantic base of five acres in circuit, the compelled labour of the myriad Jewish captives, who were dragged to Rome to grace the triumph and rear the monument of their conqueror. Still less do we envy the hurrying crowd pressing through its arcades, impatient for their seats on those hundred days of its first dedication, when five thousand wild beasts, the tribute of the provinces, were offered by the emperor on its arena, to the unsated appetite of Roman senators and matrons, youths and virgins, for excitement and blood. We neither wish to recall its ferocious! wild beast shows, when its arena was converted into a forest, where they might more curiously spring on each other, or be hunted and slain by men little less ferocious than themselves; nor its gladiatorial sacrifices, heaped till the pit ran with human blood; nor its martyr victims, save to give thanks for their faith and patience. Who does not rejoice over the Colosseum as a ruin, and that its times and people have for ever passed,

"Who sat, unknowing of these agonies,
Spectators at a show,

And clapped to see the blood run like a brook."

A story preserved by St Augustine adds to our thankfulness that we are delivered from the temptation of the wild fascination of its bloody spectacles. He tells in his "Confessions," that about the year 390, Alipius, a fellow-student of his own, who had been baptized as a Christian at Milan, when on a visit to Rome was urged by his friends to go to the gladiatorial shows in the Colosseum. He at first refused,'

Non-Mercantile Character of Rome.

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but, at length yielding to their persuasions, agreed to accom-ti pany them, resolved in his own mind to keep his eyes shut, that he might not witness the atrocities which were there o perpetrated. For a time he kept his resolution; but, startled: by a sudden shout from its assembled thousands, in appro-in bation of some remarkable feat of gladiatorial skill, his curiosity overcame him. He opened his eyes, but not to shut them again. He could not shut them. His excitement i grew fiercer with each moment, until his voice rose shouting madly with the maddest of the multitude. From that hour the gladiatorial games became the passion of his life. Hem not only returned to them habitually, he strove to influence? every one he knew to accompany him; in the words of Augustine,"Clamavit, exarsit, abstulit secum insaniam qua stimularetur redire et alios trahens."

But we must not linger amongst the ruins of the past. We would only add our entire agreement with the remarka of Goethe, that of that past "we find in Rome the marks of t a grandeur and a destruction which alike transcend our:, conceptions,"

It is with the Rome of our own day that our own life has its more intimate relations. We propose, therefore, to present some of the more marked features of the social life of Rome, as they presented themselves to us during a winter's residence there, that the reader may judge for.. himself what the papal government has done for its subjects, what it is now doing for them in the highest seat. and centre of its power. We have in England a zealous Romanising party, who would persuade us again to place ourselves under the wing of the papacy. Let us see what social fruits are reaped by Rome and its citizens who dwell under its immediate shadow !

In a first survey of the modern city, there are certain.. things which Rome has not, that strike the stranger more than those positive characteristic features, which all are, more or less, prepared to find in the seat of the papal sovereignty. If familiar with the great capitals of Europe, a first glance at Rome gives you a strong impression of its non-mercantile character. Its Tiber, a noble river, which in the days of the republic gallantly floated many a proud trireme, and which, under the better economy and fresh enterprise of a new kingdom of Italy, might be deepened. and banked like another Thames for the commerce of a a great capital, is now without a keel to furrow its waters., The solitude of the Tiber, as it sweeps through a great city, is astounding. It is a waste of waters in spite of the life on its banks. You ask, Where are its merchantmen? You

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