his son’s fall reached the aged father, the old Roman spirit blazed up for a moment in him, and he exhorted his soldiers “not to be disheartened by a loss that concerned himself only.”  In this last triumph of a nobler nature he disappears from our view; and he who built this magnificent monument to the mother of his gallant son had himself no monument.  More fortunate than her husband, whose evil manners live in brass,—­less fortunate than her son, whose virtues have been handed down for the admiration of posterity,—­Caecilia Metella has left no record of her existence beyond her name.  All else has been swallowed up by the oblivion of ages.  Whether her husband raised this colossal trophy of the dust to commemorate his own pride of wealth, or his devoted love for her, we know not.  He achieved his object; but he has given to his wife only the mockery of immortality.  The substance has gone beyond recall, and but the shadow, the mere empty name, remains.

Built up against this monument are the remains of the castle in which the Gaetani family long maintained their feudal warfare, with fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls.  And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof.  Like the fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features of interest.  It is very unlike any other church in Italy, and reminds one of the country churches of England.  What led the Gaetanis to adopt this foreign style of ecclesiastical architecture is a circumstance unexplained.  Altogether it is a most incongruous group of objects that are here clustered together—­a tomb, a fortress, and a church—­and affords a curious illustration of the bizarre condition of society at the time.  An extraordinary echo repeats here every sound entrusted to it with the utmost distinctness.  It doubtless multiplied the wailings of the mourners who brought to this spot two thousand years ago the ashes of the dead; it sent back the rude sounds of warfare which disturbed the peace of the tomb in the middle ages; and now it haunts the spot like the voice of the past, “informing the solitude,” and giving a response to each new-comer according to his mood.

Beyond the tomb of Caecilia Metella the Appian Way becomes more interesting and beautiful.  The high walls which previously shut in the road on either side now disappear, and nothing separates it from the Campagna but a low dyke of loose stones.  The traveller obtains an uninterrupted view of the immense melancholy plain, which stretches away to the horizon with hardly a single tree to relieve the desolation.  Here and there on the waste surface are fragments of ruins which speak to the heart, by their very muteness, more