he knew nothing of their import, detected the fact of the obelisk being a mere imitation.  It was cut and engraved at Syene by order of the emperor Domitian, who designed it to adorn his villa on the Lake of Albano.  From thence it was removed by the usurper Maxentius to the circus on the Appian Way, founded by him, and named after his son Romulus.  It is now on the site of the old Circus Agonalis, whose form and boundaries are marked out by the houses of the Piazza Navona.  Surmounted by the Pope’s device of a dove with an olive branch, a vain substitute of heraldry for sacred symbolism, and standing on an artificial rock-work about forty feet high, composed of figures of Tritons and nymphs, disporting themselves amid plashing fountains and marble foliage, the whole subject is incongruous and utterly opposed to the simplicity and majesty of the ancient monuments.

Near the Pantheon there is a pair of obelisks which were brought from the East, and stood together before the temple of Isis and Serapis, which is supposed to have been situated on the site of the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.  They were found when digging the foundations of the church in 1667, along with an altar of Isis, now in the Capitoline Museum.  One of these obelisks was erected by Clement XI. in 1711, in front of the Pantheon, in the midst of the fountain of the Piazza.  Its height is only about seventeen feet, and the hieroglyphics on it indicate that it was constructed by Psammeticus II., the supposed Hophra of Hebrew history.  This same monarch also constructed its twin-fellow which now stands in the Piazza Minerva in the near neighbourhood.  The celebrated sculptor Bernini, when re-erecting it at the command of Pope Alexander VII. in 1660, had the exceedingly bad taste to balance it on the back of a marble elephant, the work of his pupil Ferrata; on account of which absurd incongruity Bernini received from the satirical Roman populace the nickname of “The Elephant.”  Only one obelisk in Rome was not restored or re-erected by any Pope, viz. that which stands in the beautiful grounds of the Villa Mattei in the Coelian Hill.  It was found near the Capitol on the site of an ancient temple of Isis, and was presented by the magistrates to the owner of the villa, a great collector of antiquities.  It is said that when it was raised in 1563, on its red granite pedestal, the mason who superintended the work incautiously rested his hand on the block, when the shaft suddenly slid down and crushed it, the bones of the imprisoned member being still held between the two stones.

The foregoing were the last obelisks erected in Rome by the emperors.  After them no more were constructed either in the imperial city or in their native land of Egypt.  The language inscribed upon them had come to be superseded by the universal use of the Greek tongue; there was no use therefore in making monuments for the reception of hieroglyphic records which nobody could understand or interpret.  The