that amaze one even in piccolo at Milan and Turin:  Here were supper-rooms, and taverns, and shops, and I believe baths; certainly long galleries big enough to drive a coach round, and places where slaves waited to receive the commands of masters and ladies, who perhaps if they did not wait to please them, would scarcely scruple to detain them in the cage of offenders, and keep them to make sport upon a future day.

The cruelties then exercised on servants at Rome were truly dreadful; and we all remember reading that in Augustus’s time, when he did a private friend the honour to dine with him, one of the waiters broke a glass he was about to present full of liquor to the King; at which offence the master being enraged, suddenly caused him to be seized by the rest, and thrown instantly out of the window to feed his lampreys, which lived in a pond on which the apartment looked.  Augustus said nothing at the moment; to punish the nobleman’s inhumanity however, he sent his officers next morning to break every glass in the house:  A curious chastisement enough, and worthy of a nation who, being powerful to erect, populous to fill, and elegantly-skilful to adorn such a fabric as this Coliseum which I have just been contemplating, were yet contented and even happy to view from its well-arranged seats, exhibitions capable of giving nothing but disgust and horror;—­lions rending unarmed wretches in pieces; or, to the still deeper disgrace of poor Humanity, those wretches armed unwillingly against each other, and dying to divert a brutal populace.

These reflections upon Pagan days and classical cruelties do not disturb however the peace of an old hermit, who has chosen one of these close-concealed recesses for his habitation, and accordingly dwells, dismally enough, in a hole seldom visited by travellers, and certainly never enquired about by the natives.  I stumbled on his strange apartment by mere chance, and asked him why he had chosen it?  He had been led in early youth, he said, to reflect upon the miseries suffered by the original professors of Christianity; the tortures inflicted on them in this horrible amphitheatre, and the various vicissitudes of Rome since:  that he had dedicated himself to these meditations:  that he had left the world seventeen years, never stirring from his cell but to buy food, which he eat alone and sparingly, and to pay his devotions in the Via Crucis, for so the old Arena is now called; a simple plain wooden cross occupying the middle of it, and round the Circus twelve neat, not splendid chapels; a picture to each, representing the various stages of our Saviour’s passion.  Such are the meek triumphs of our meek religion!  And that such substitutes should have replaced the African savages, tigers, hyaenas, &c. and Roman gladiators, not less ferocious than their four-legged antagonists, I am quite as willing to rejoice at as the hermit:  They must be better antiquarians too than I am, who regret that a nunnery now covers the spot where ambitious Tullia drove over the bleeding body of her murdered parent,