of the Senators at dead of night and commanded their presence; and when they, trembling with fear, and expecting nothing less than that their heads were all to fall, had been kept waiting for an hour, the door opened, and he, nearly naked, appeared with a fiddle in his hand, and, after fiddling and dancing to his quaking audience for an hour, dismissed them to their homes uninjured.  The air seems to keep a sort of spiritual scent or trail of these old deeds, and to make them more real here than elsewhere.  The old horrors of the Amphitheatre can be made real to any person of imaginative mind in the Colosseum.  He has but to lend himself to the contagion of the place, and he will see the circle of ten thousand eager eyes thirsting for his blood, fill up the ruined benches and arched tiers as of yore, and hear the savage murmur of human voices, worse than the dull roar of the beasts below.  The past still lives in these old walls.  It is in vain to say that the ghosts of history do not haunt their ancient habitations.  Places, as well as persons, have lives and influences; and the horror of murder will not away from a spot.  Haunted by its crimes, oppressed and debilitated by the fierce excesses of its Empire, Rome, silent, grave, and meditative, sighs over its past, wrapped in the penitent robes of the Church.

Besides, here one feels that the modern Romans are only the children of their ancient fathers, with the same characteristics,—­softened, indeed, and worn down by time, just as the sharp traits of the old marbles have worn away; but still the same people,—­proud, passionate, lazy, jealous, vindictive, easy, patient, and able.  The Popes are but Church pictures of the Emperors,—­a different robe, but the same nature beneath;—­Alexander the VI. was but a second Tiberius—­Pius the VII., a modern Augustus.  When I speak of the Roman people, I do not mean the class of hangers-on upon the foreigners, but the Trasteverini and the inhabitants of the provinces and mountains.  No one can go through the Trastevere when the people are roused, without feeling that they are the same as those who listened to Marcus Antonius and Brutus, when the bier of Caesar was brought into the streets,—­and as those who fought with the Colonna and stabbed Rienzi at the foot of the Capitol steps.  The Ciceruacchio of ’48 was but an ancient Tribune of the People, in the primitive sense of that title.  I like, too, to parallel the anecdote of Caius Marius, when, after his ruin, he concealed himself in the marshes, and astonished his captors, who expected to find him weak of heart, by the magnificent self-assertion of “I am Caius Marius,” with the story which is told of Stefano Colonna.  After this great captain met with his sad reverses, and, deprived of all his possessions, fled from Rome, an attendant asked him,—­“What fortress have you now?” He placed his hand on his heart and answered,—­“Eccola!” The same blood evidently ran in the veins of both these men; and well might Petrarca call Colonna “a phoenix risen from the ashes of the ancient Romans.”