by their associations, recalled the memory of a thousand illustrious actions. "Even the water of Rome," said Angelica Kauffman, "elicits all the nobler faculties of the soul !” The melancholy appearance of these ruins was the remote cause of Rienzi's attempt to re-establish the commonwealth : and with what genuine feeling did Petrarch lament, that the marble columns and fragments of antiquity, which had formed the glory of that once mighty city, should be transported from their native soil to adorn the palaces of Naples! Alas, how much more fallen now has become the City of the World, once the "delight and beauty of the universe;" raising its melancholy ruins among fields, which appear, by their abandoned state, to have suffered from a conflagration, a famine, or a pestilence! to Pope Alexander the Sixth destroyed the pyramid of Scipio, pave the streets with its materials :-and not a few of the noblest structures were defaced and destroyed by Gregory the Great, that pilgrims and devotees might not lose their enthusiasm in their admiration of antiquity. Robbed, insulted, and ruined by the modern Vandals ;-men, who derived an exquisite pleasure in treading on all, that was great, illustrious, and magnificent, and who, in the fury and ignorance of barbaric pride, would have disfigured even an angel of Albano,-how many an awful event transformed Italy into barbarism, and left the finest country in the world desolate and weeping! Violence and rapine stalked upon her mountains; fire and slaughter depopulated her valleys; her palaces were despoiled of their treasures; and the masterpieces of Caracci, Raphael, and Guido, of Titian, Angelo, and Correggio, doomed to adorn the galleries of an exotic soil. Had the Colosseum and St. Peter's been capable of removal, da altri Autori;" bound up with "Ristretto, delle Historie del Mondo del P. Torsellino."-Roma, 1634. a These ruins cover about five acres of ground; and the space has, in the course of ages, become, as it were, a natural botanic garden; so numerous and so various are the plants, which grow there. Dr. Sebastiani, of Rome, has those eternal monuments, also, had contributed to the embellishment of a foreign capitala. It is impossible to contemplate Rome without sentiments of profound awe and admiration. For so transcendent is its power of exciting associations ", that were St. Peter's, and all the remains of ancient and modern industry and art pulverised, as it were, into atoms, small as the sands of the desert; yet will that portion of the Tiber, near which they stood, be sacred to the poet, the pilgrim, the philosopher, and the statesman, till a new order of intellect has impressed upon mankind a new order of sensation, and a new method of employing the faculties of memory and perception. с Immortalized by three hundred and twenty triumphs: so magnificent, that a prince of Persia could not refrain from congratulating himself, that men died there, as well as elsewhere and now exhibiting, in one single monument, a structure so admirable, that the Abbé Barthelemy recognised in it all the grandeur of "l'ancienne Egypte, l'ancienne Athènes, l'ancienne Rome:" impossible is it to stand at the feet of antique columns; to see the numerous mutilated statues and imperfect vases; the fragments, and the half-defaced inscriptions; to walk upon the remains of tessellated pavements; and to read their history in coins and medals; without feeling the mind assume all the faculties of a poet. For the heart melts, as if it were awakened from the contemplation of a drawn up a list of them; and it is a remarkable fact, that out of 261, no fewer than 148 are natives of the British Islands.-Williams' Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, vol. i. p. 389. The Flora is peculiarly interesting, not only to the botanist, but to the antiquary. These works were restored to their respective cities at the Peace. b When Ariosto first saw Florence and its environs, he exclaimed, “If all these palaces were assembled together, two Romes would scarcely equal the grandeur of Florence." But when Napoleon invited Canova to take up his permanent abode at Paris, Canova replied, “Sans son atelier, sans ses amis, sans son beau ciel, sans sa Rome ?" So well did the sculptor feel the power and influence of that city. • Ammianus Marcellinus. melancholy, yet delightful dream: while a hallowed sensibility, stamped in the moulds of delicacy and taste,-adds purity to the grandeur and sublimity of the soul. Meditating on the rise of republics, and the revolutions of empires; the changes of manners, customs, laws, and opinions; a progression of ages is exhibited to the mind, in characters and pictures, which gives an enlarged view of human actions, and speaks a language, promising immortality; though every fragment bears for its own inscription, "I die daily." In the midst Divided by a river, on whose banks Par. Reg. iv. 31. In viewing these fragments, the mind seems as if it were born for high purposes: and it contemplates them, in consequence, with awe and solemnity. Towers, arches, and battlements seem to survive the lapse of ages, merely for the purpose of exciting to actions, worthy some mighty intellectual power. Fame seems to mantle every turret, for the purpose of throwing into remote perspective the comparative littleness of all other men's attainments and pursuits and, as the fall of Corinth and Carthage increased the wealth and influence of Marseilles, in the expiring fragments of former ages we read the rudiments of a glory, that shall never perish. But in the contemplation of the Colosseum, the agony of debasing passions acquires redoubled strength, if not a new existence: no tears of generous enthusiasm are shed; reflection knows no graceful pause; dazzled by riches, variety, power, and magnificence,-not splendid and imaginative, but sullen and expansive, the soul seems to brood, as it were, over ruin and desolation, on which the glory of chivalry has never shone a. PARIS. NEXT to the associations of Rome, are those of Paris. Entering that city, what melancholy reflections mingle with sentiments of awe and admiration; since more important events have occurred within its walls, than in any other city, if we except Rome, Babylon, and Jerusalem". So many instances of magnanimity; so many crimes; a successive theatre for the best and worst of men; so many massacres. Brissot; Roland; Robespierre and Danton; the virtues of Malesherbes: the crimes of Mirabeau; the spot where Louis was beheaded; the massacre of September; Napoleon. And what examples of eloquence! how many sublime instances of affection, and all the nobler passions! how many of treason, insurrection, rebellion, and murder! So many monuments, attesting the spirit of the age; so many of the proudest institutions disorganised: how many a specimen of art destroyed; and replaced by those of other nations and of other ages. Every feeling of the human heart in exercise; man in his noblest and in his meanest attitudes! Science, ignorance, virtue, crime, occupying the same page: the a "As a whole, ancient or modern Rome beats Greece, Constantinople, every thing, at least, that I have ever seen. But I cannot describe, because my first impressions are always strong and confused, and my memory selects and reduces them to order, like distance in the landscape, and blends them better, although they may be less distinct."-LORD BYRON, Rome, May 9, 1817. Dr. Clarke seems to have thought otherwise :-" Rome is almost as insignificant in comparison with Athens as London with Rome; and one regrets the consciousness that no probable union of circumstances will ever again carry the effects of human labour to the degree of perfection they have attained here." b There is said to be only one Roman ruin in all Paris; viz. Le Palais des Thermes, situate in la Rue de la Harpe. There is not more than one in London, and that in St. Swithin's Lane. mother, the wife, the sister; the lover, the son, the father; the husband, and the friend :—frivolity; wisdom; rapacity; honesty; wealth; penury; all ranks levelled, and again restored the successive theatre of the noblest and the meanest of motives; an arena for wild beasts, in the forms of men; an Atheneum for the loftiest flights of human intellect. Throwing a magic mantle over every thing, the mind becomes poetical; the heart sensitive:-the Bastile; the Confederation; the Champ de Mars;-so many instances of martyrdom; fidelity; devotion; and patriotism. Here royalty, republicanism, oligarchy, democracy, and anarchy, had successive trials. Here liberty received more fatal stabs from democracy, than it had ever received from tyranny. Here the public mind was elevated; now enervated; now sublimed; now debased; now palsied; now invigorated; now irritated; now electrified; now poisoned; now barbarised; and again civilised! The greatest generals; the most intriguing statesmen; the most energetic writers! The same men philosophers to-day, and worse-far worse,-than barbarians on the morrow. LONDON. THIS vast city,-containing a population, equal to that of the entire island, in the days of Cæsar,-with the exception of great monuments of antiquity, affords more objects for a sublime mind to contemplate, than any other on the surface of the globe. There is no where such freedom and comfort; it is the centre of trade, legislation, and the useful arts; the temple of science; and MAN is seen in the highest state of dignified cultivation and power. In one spot we see all the wonders of mineralogy: in others the splendour of vegetables; in another we turn from the busts of Trajan, |