And this is one great charm of Rome,—­that it animates the dead figures of its history.  On the spot where they lived and acted, the Caesars change from the manikins of books to living men; and Virgil, Horace, and Cicero grow to be realities, as we walk down the Sacred Way and over the very pavement they may once have trod.  The conversations “De Claris Oratoribus” and the “Tusculan Questions” seem like the talk of the last generation, as we wander on the heights of Tusculum, or over the grounds of that charming villa on the banks of the Liris, which the great Roman orator so graphically describes in his treatise “De Legibus.”  The landscape of Horace has not changed.  Still in the winter you may see the dazzling peak of the “gelidus Algidus” and “ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”; and wandering at Tivoli in the summer, his description,

  “Domus Albuneae resonantis,
  Et praeceps Anio, et Tiburni lucus, et uda
  Mobililius pomaria rivis,”

is as true and fresh as if his words were of yesterday.  Could one better his compliment to any Roman Lalage of to-day than to call her “dulce ridentem”?  In all its losses, Rome has not lost the sweet smile of its people.  Would you like to know the modern rules for agriculture in Rome, read the “Georgics”; there is so little to alter, that it is not worth mentioning.  So, too, at Rome, the Emperors become as familiar as the Popes.  Who does not know the curly-headed Marcus Aurelius, with his lifted brow and projecting eyes, from the full, round beauty of his youth to the more haggard look of his latest years?  Are there any modern portraits more familiar than the pensive, wedge-like head of Augustus, with his sharp-cut lips and nose,—­or the dull phiz of Hadrian, with his hair combed down over his low forehead,—­or the vain, perking face of Lucius Verus, with his thin nose, low brow, and profusion of curls,—­or the brutal bull head of Caracalla,—­or the bestial, bloated features of Vitellius?

These men, who were but lay-figures to us at school, mere pegs of names to hang historic robes upon, thus interpreted by the living history of their portraits, the incidental illustrations of the places where they lived and moved and died, and the buildings and monuments they erected, become like the men of yesterday.  Art has made them our contemporaries.  They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon.  I never drive out of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of Nero,—­his recognition there by an old centurion,—­his damp, drear hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited for his executioners,—­and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death, as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer to me, more vivid, and more actual, than the death of Rossi in the court of the Cancelleria.  I never drive by the Caesars’ palaces, without recalling the ghastly jest of Tiberius, when he sent for some fifteen