of magnificent desolation, and of melancholy yet sublime interest:  its wildness, its vastness, its waste and solitary openness, add to its effect upon the imagination.  The only human beings I beheld in the compass of at least two miles, were a few herdsmen driving their cattle through the gate of San Giovanni, and two or three strangers who were sauntering about with their note books and portfolios, apparently enthusiasts like myself, lost in the memory of the past and the contemplation of the present.

I spent some time in the Lateran, then drove to the Coliseum, where I found a long procession of penitents, their figures and faces totally concealed by their masks and peculiar dress, chaunting the Via Crucis.  I then examined the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome, and satisfied myself by ocular demonstration of the truth of the measurements which gave sixty feet for the height of the columns and eighteen feet for the circumference.  I knew enough of geometrical proportion to prove this to my own satisfaction.  On examining the fragments which remain, each fluting measured a foot, that is, eight inches right across.  This appears prodigious, but it is nevertheless true.  I am forced to believe to-day what I yesterday doubted, and deemed a piece of mere antiquarian exaggeration.

This magnificent edifice was designed and built by the Emperor Adrian, who piqued himself on his skill in architecture, and carried his jealousy of other artists so far, as to banish Apollodorus, who had designed the Forum of Trajan.  When he had finished the Temple of Venus and Rome, he sent to Apollodorus a plan of his stupendous structure, challenging him to find a single fault in it.  The architect severely criticised some trifling oversights; and the Emperor, conscious of the justice of his criticisms, and unable to remedy the defects, ordered him to be strangled.  Such was the fate of Apollodorus, whose misfortune it was to have an Emperor for his rival.

They are now clearing the steps which lead to this temple, from which it appears that the length of the portico in front was three hundred feet, and of the side five hundred feet.

While I was among these ruins, I was struck by a little limpid fountain, which gushed from the crumbling wall and lost itself among the fragments of the marble pavement.  All looked dreary and desolate; and that part of the ruin which from its situation must have been the sanctum sanctorum, the shrine of the divinity of the place, is now a receptacle of filth and every conceivable abomination.

I walked on to the ruins now called the Basilica of Constantine, once the Temple of Peace.  This edifice was in a bad style, and constructed at a period when the arts were at a low ebb:  yet the ruins are vast and magnificent.  The exact direction of the Via Sacra has long been a subject of vehement dispute.  They have now laid open a part of it which ran in front of the Basilica:  the pavement is about twelve feet below the present pavement of Rome, and the soil turned up in their excavations is formed entirely of crumbled brickwork and mortar, and fragments of marble, porphyry, and granite.  I returned by the Forum and the Capitol, through the Forums of Nerva and Trajan, and so over the Monte Cavallo, home.