he would behold the Temple of Augustus, built for the worship of the deified founder of the Roman Empire.  A Christian cathedral dedicated to St. Proculus, who suffered martyrdom in the same year with St. Januarius, containing the tomb of Pergolesi, the celebrated musical composer, now occupies the site of the pagan shrine, and has six of its Corinthian pillars, that looked down upon the apostle as he landed, built into its walls.  A temple of Diana and a temple of the Nymphs also adorned the town, from which numerous columns and sculptures have been recently recovered.  On every side the apostle would see mournful tokens that the city was wholly given up to idolatry,—­to the worship of mortal men and an ignoble crowd of gods and goddesses borrowed from all nations; and yet he had equally sad proofs that the idolatry was altogether a hollow and heartless pretence,—­that the superstitious creed publicly maintained by the city had long ceased to command the respect of its recognised defenders.

I walked up from the town along the remains of the Via Campana, a cross-road that led from Puteoli to Capua and there joined the famous Appian Way.  Along this road the apostle passed on his way to Rome; and it is still paved with the original lava-blocks upon which his feet had pressed.  One of the principal objects on the way is the amphitheatre of Nero, with its tiers of seats, its arena, and its subterranean passages, in a wonderful state of preservation, richly plumed with the delicate fronds of the maiden-hair fern, which drapes with its living loveliness so many of the ruins of Greece and Italy.  It was here that Nero himself rehearsed the parts in which he wished to act on the more public stage of Rome.  The sands of the arena were dyed with the blood of St. Januarius, who was thrown to the wild beasts by order of Diocletian, and whose blood is annually liquefied by a supposititious miracle in Naples at the present day.  Behind the amphitheatre the apostle would get a glimpse of the famous Phlegraean Fields so often referred to in the classic poets as the scene of the wars of the gods and the giants.

This is the Holy Land of Paganism.  All the scenery of the eleventh book of the Odyssey and of the sixth book of the AEneid spreads beneath the eye.  At every step you come upon some spot associated with the romantic literature of antiquity.  From thence the imaginative shapes of Greek mythology passed into the poetry of Rome.  There everything takes us back far beyond the birth of Roman civilisation, and reminds us of the legends of the older Hellenic days, which will exercise an undying spell on the higher minds of the human race down to the latest ages.  It is the land of Virgil, whose own tomb is not far off; and under the guidance of his genius we visit the ghostly Cimmerian shores, now bathed in glowing sunshine, and stand on spots that thrilled the hearts of Hercules and Ulysses with awe.  There the terrible Avernus, to which the descent was so