some vestiges overlooking the Circus Maximus on the other side of the hill.

A contiguous portion of the Palatine is occupied by the kitchen gardens and vineyards of the Casino Spada, or Magnani, which the pretended frescoes of Raphael have not preserved from ruin. Half a century ago a tower looking over the site of the Circus Maximus, and which made part of the Cæsarean palace, was restored. But the curse of Jerusalem hangs over this hill -it is again in ruins. In this quarter is shown a suite of subterranean chambers, usually denominated the Baths of Nero; for this Emperor being a great builder, is generally called in to father all unknown remains. An Englishman excavated these chambers in 1777, and the ground of the villa is now at the disposal of any one who chooses to pay a very moderate sum for so imperial a purchase, and the pleasure of experiments.

The Palatine, it has been remarked, has, no less than the vallies, been encumbered with accumulated soil. These chambers were surely above ground. No descent to them was discovered, but has been since constructed.

The next garden and vineyard, for so the Palatine is now divided, is in possession of the Irish college, and some rustic or playful antiquaries had, in 1817, chalked upon the gate

way,

"The Hippodrome, the Temple of Apollo, the house of the Vestals." The shape of the vineyard does resemble a place for equestrian exercises. Apollo and the Vestals may be lodged at will in any of the towering vaults or underground crypts of these enormous masses.

You may explore for hours either above or below, through the arched corridores, or on the platforms whose stuccoed floorings have resisted a thousand winters, and serve as a roof to the ruins beneath. From the corner of this platform there is one of the most impressive views of the Coliseum and the remains of the old city, both within and without the walls. The long lines of aqueducts stretched across the bare campagna, are the arms of the fallen giant. The look of these great structures, built for some purpose which the shrunk condition of the modern city did not render apparent, made a Roman of the fifteenth century call them insane'. Your walks in the Palatine ruins, if it be one of the many days when the labourers do not work, will be undisturbed, unless you startle a fox in breaking through the brambles in the corridores, or burst unawares through the hole of some shivered

"Celsos fornices et insana acquæductorum opera perlustrans," F. Blond. Roma. Inst. lib. iii. fo. 3. if he did not mean broken.

fragments into one of the half buried chambers which the peasants have blocked up to serve as stalls for their jackasses, or as huts for those who watch the gardens. The smoke of their wood fires has not hidden the stuccoes and deeply indented mouldings of the imperial roofs. The soil accumulated in this quarter has formed a slope on the side of the ruins, and some steps have been adjusted into the bank. Half way up an open oratory has been niched into a wall.

The

Religion is still triumphant after the fall of the palace of the Cæsars, the towers of feudal lords, and the villas of papal princes. church and contiguous monastery of St. Bonaventura, preserve a spark of life upon the site of the town of Romulus. The only lane which crosses the Palatine, leads to this church between dead walls, where the stations of the via crucis divert the attention from the fall of the Cæsars, to the sublimer and more humiliating sufferings of God himself. The tall fragments of the imperial ruins rising from a hill, which seems one wide field of crossed and trellised reeds hung round with vines, form the most striking portion of the prospect of the old town, seen from the platform of St. Pietro in Montorio, or the other eminences beyond the Tyber. They are so thickly strewn, and so massive, that it is not surprising the inhabitants of the rising

town chose rather to seek for other sites, than to attempt to clear them away. But they are not without their use, for the flagging vapours of the malaria are supposed to settle round their summits, as well as those of the Coliseum, and thus to spare the modern city.

Where all repair has been hopeless, the descendants of those who reared these mighty fabrics have converted the desolation of the ancient city to the purposes of other havoc. They scrape the old walls of the Palatine, as well as those of the Baths of Titus, for saltpetre, of which a manufacture has been established in both those positions; and thus, if the phrase may be used, ruin begets ruin, destruction propagates destruction.

Stanza CX.

and apostolic statues climb

To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes lay sublime, &c.

Sixtus Quintus raised the statue of St. Peter on the summit of the column of Trajan. A liberty has, in the above verses, been taken with the probable position of the urn of Trajan, in compliance with a tradition, that the ashes of that emperor were in the head of a spear, which the colossal statue raised on the pillar, held

in his hand'. But the remains of Trajan were buried in a golden urn under the column, and continued in that depository in the time of Theodoric. The value of the urn was sure to be fatal to the deposit; but we know nothing of the time when poverty and rapine had lost all respect for the remains of the best of the Roman princes. An absurd story, which was current in the English churches in the ninth century, would make us suppose that the Christians condescended to except Trajan from the usual condemnation of pagans, and that Gregory the

1 A medal of Vespasian has been found with a column surmounted by an urn. See-Joseph. Castalionis, de colum. triump. comment. ap. Græv. Antiq. Rom. tom. iv. p. 1947.

* Τὰ δὲ τοῦ Τραϊανου ὀστᾶ ἐν τῷ κιόνι αυτοῦ κατετέθη. Dion. Hist. Rom. lib. 69. tom. ii. p. 1150. edit. Hamb. 1750. "Sunt qui in pila, quam tenebat Colossus, cineres conditos dicunt: quo fundamento adhuc requiro." See Comment. to lib. lxviii. tom. ii. p. 1133, of the Xylandro-Leunclavian version.

"Ossa in urna aurea collocata sub Columna Fori quæ ejus nomine vocitatur, recondita sunt, cujus columnæ altitudo in 140 pedes erigitur." Cassiod. in Chronic. p. 388. tom. i. fo. 1679. Cassiodorus must be reckoned good authority for what he tells of the Rome which he saw, although his chronicle from the beginning of the world to the year 519, must be expected to be rather inaccurate. For a character of this writer, and for the question whether there were not two Cassiodorus, father and son, to whom the actions of the one should be attributed, see-Tiraboschi Storia della Lett. Ital. tom. iii. lib. i. cap. i.