occupies a commanding position at the top of the Spanish Stairs, in front of the Church of Trinita dei Monti.  It stood originally on the spina of the circus of Sallust, in his gardens, and is covered with hieroglyphics of the rudest workmanship, which sufficiently proclaim their origin, as a Roman forgery probably of the period of the Antonine emperors.  In the midst of the public gardens, on the Pincian Hill, there is another Roman obelisk about thirty feet high, excavated from the quarries of Syene, and set up by Hadrian originally at Antinopolis in Egypt in front of a temple dedicated to the deified Antinous, the lamented favourite of the emperor.  It was afterwards transferred to the imperial villa at Tivoli, near Rome, and subsequently to the grounds of the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, from whence it was finally taken to its present site.  This obelisk has a special interest because it commemorates one of the most beautiful and touching examples of self-sacrifice which the annals of paganism afford.  We are apt to judge of Antinous from the languid beauty of the statue of him in the Roman galleries, as simply the pampered sycophant of a court.  But behind his sensual beauty and softness there was an unselfish devotion which the caresses of royalty and the favours of fortune could not spoil.  When the oracle declared that the happiness of Hadrian, who was afflicted with a profound melancholy, could only be secured by the sacrifice of what was most dear to him, Antinous went at once and drowned himself in the Nile, and thus gave his life for his imperial friend, who, instead of being made better by the sacrifice, was left altogether inconsolable.  The magnificent city founded to perpetuate his memory is now a heap of ruined mounds, and the obelisk that bore his name in Egypt now stands far away in Rome; but time cannot quench the glow of sympathy that kindles in the heart of every one who remembers his story of noble self-sacrificing love.

There are three or four obelisks that mark the introduction of the Egyptian worship of Isis into the imperial city of the later emperors.  At one time everything Egyptian was fashionable in Rome, and the goddess of Egypt was domesticated in the Roman Pantheon, and temples in her honour were erected in several parts of the city and throughout the empire.  Obelisks, fashioned in Egypt by command of the Romans, were often placed in front of the temples.  But these spurious obelisks have little dignity or significance, and suffer wofully when brought into comparison with specimens of the genuine work of old Egypt.  The largest and most imposing of these monuments of the new faith of the city is the one that now stands in the Piazza Navona, formerly called the Pamphilian Obelisk, in honour of the family name of Pope Innocent X., who placed it there.  It is forty feet high, of red granite, broken into five pieces, and covered with hieroglyphics, the whole style and execution of which are so inferior that Winkelman long ago, although