half-developments of spring, can one wander safely through the place.  The sting of the serpent is in this Eden.  Cursed is the ground for man’s sake in the fairest scene that his industry, and genius, and virtue can make for himself; but cursed with a double curse is the ground that he makes a wilderness by his selfishness and wickedness.  And this double curse, this fatal Circean spell, has come upon these beautiful grounds in common with all the neighbourhood of Rome because of ages of human waste and wrong-doing.  How striking a picture do they present of all earth’s beauties and possessions, which promise what they cannot fully accomplish, which give no rest for the head or home for the heart, and in which, when disposed to place our trust, we hear ever and anon the warning cry, “Arise and depart, for this is not your rest, for it is polluted, for it will destroy you with a sore destruction.”  And not without significance is the circumstance that such a lesson on the vanity of all earthly things should be suggested by what one sees over against the house of prayer.  It illustrates and emphasises the precept which bids the worshipper set his affections on things above, so that the house of God may become to him the very gate of heaven.

From the entrance of the church, through a long suburb, you trace the old Flaminian road till it crosses the Tiber at the Ponte Molle, the famous Milvian Bridge.  It is strange to think of this hoary road of many memories being now laid down with modern tramway rails, along which cars like those in any of our great manufacturing towns continually run.  This is one of the many striking instances in which the past and the present are incongruously united in Rome.  You see on the right side of the road a picturesque ridge of cliffs clothed with shaggy ilexes and underwood, overhanging at intervals the walls and buildings.  It was formed by lava ejected from some ancient volcano in the neighbourhood; and over it was deposited, by the action of acidulated waters rising through the volcanic rock, a stratum of travertine or fresh-water limestone.  Not far off is a mineral spring called Acqua Acetosa, much frequented by the inhabitants on summer mornings, which may be considered one of the expiring efforts of volcanic action in the neighbourhood.  The Milvian Bridge is associated with most interesting and important historical events.  The Roman citizens, two hundred years before Christ, met here the messengers who announced the defeat of Asdrubal on the Metaurus at the end of the second Punic war.  Here the ambassadors of the Allobroges implicated in Catiline’s conspiracy were arrested by order of Cicero.  And from the parapets of the bridge the body of Maxentius, the rival pagan emperor, was hurled into the Tiber, after his defeat by Constantine in the great battle of Saxa Rubra, which took place a little distance off.  Visitors to the Vatican will remember the spirited representation of this battle on the walls of Raphael’s