Camillus met them with his army as they were escaping towards Rome, and moved by their anguish, bade them be of good cheer, for he would soon transfer their troubles to their conquerors, and this he did, for that very day he reached the town, found it undefended, and the Etruscans occupied in collecting the spoil. Before night the rightful inhabitants were restored, and their victors driven out. From the rapidity with which his march was effected, "ire Sutrium" became henceforth a proverb for doing anything in a hurry. Soon after (368) the town was again taken by the Etruscans, and again restored by Camillus: in 443 the old enemy once more besieged it, when the consul Fabius came to the rescue.

As we approach the town on the Roman side, the rocks on the left of the road are filled with tombs. They are cut in the tufa, but many seem to have been fronted with more durable stone-work. The cliffs are crested by grand old ilexes which hang downwards in the most luxuriant masses of foliage, unspoilt by the axe. There is no appearance of anything more than this, and it is startling, when one turns aside from the road and crossing a strip of green meadow passes through a gap in the rocks, to find oneself suddenly in a Roman Amphitheatre, perfect in all its forms, almost in all its details, with corridors, staircases, vomitories, and twelve ranges of seats one above the other, not built, but hewn out of the solid rock, all one with the cliffs which outwardly make no sign. The Coliseum is grander, but scarcely so impressive as this vast ruin in its absolute desertion, where Nature, from which it was taken by Art, has once more asserted her rights, and where the flowers and the maiden-hair fern, clambering everywhere up the

grey steps and fringing the rock galleries, and the green lizards darting to and fro, are the only spectators which look down upon the turfy arena. All around the great ilexes girdle it in, with here and there the tall spire of a cypress shooting up into the clear air. The silence is almost awful, and there is a strange witchery in the solitude of this place, which nothing leads up to, and which bears such an impress of the greatness of those who conceived it, and made it, and once thronged the ranges of its rock-hewn benches, now so unspeakably desolate. Dennis considers that the amphitheatre of Sutri was "perhaps the type of all those celebrated structures raised by Imperial Rome, even of the Coliseum itself. For we have historical evidence that Rome derived her theatrical exhibitions from Etruria. Livy tells us that ludi stenici, a new thing for a warlike people, who had hitherto only known the games of the circus, were introduced into Rome in the year 390, in order to appease the wrath of the gods for a pestilence then devastating the city, and that ludiones were sent for from Etruria, who acted to the sound of the pipe, in the Etruscan fashion."

under the old city. The tufa, glowing from the red and golden colour with which time has stained it, is half rock and half masonry, the natural cliffs being surmounted by ranges of Etruscan walling, and the whole crested by stately medieval houses which follow every crevice of the natural formation, and occasionally, where more space required, are bracketted out from it upon arches.

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On the other side of the narrow ravine, the rocky barrier is still fringed with ilexes and perforated with tombs. little path attracted us to the entrance of one of these, just beneath the villa and the old clipped garden of the Marchese Savorelli. Over the door is inscribed in Italian :— "Here stay thy step; the place is sacred to God, to the Virgin, and to the repose of the departed. Pray or pass on.' It admitted us to one of the most interesting places we ever entered. Several tombs had apparently been thrown together at a very early period of Christianity, and formed a very long narrow Christian church, of which the pavement, roof, pillars, and seats were all one, and all carved out of the living rock. From the ante-chapel or entrance tomb, still surrounded with its couches for the dead after the manner of Etruria, one looks down an avenue of low pillars green with damp, and separated from the aisles by rockhewn seats, to the altar, beyond which, from an inner sanctuary, a light streams in upon the gloom. On the rock walls are mouldering frescoes-the Annunciation, the Salutation, the Last Supper; several saints, and a grand angel with a face raised in low relief. It is a touching and most unearthly sanctuary, and carries one back to the earliest times. of Christian life and Christian suffering more forcibly than the most celebrated Roman catacomb. The church is now

called, "La Madonna del Parto," and is still much frequented. A poor woman, while we were there, was kneelin the dimness, so lost in prayer, that she seemed quite unconscious of the strangers wandering about, though they must be rare enough at Sutri. The chapel beyond the altar had a traditional communication with the Roman catacombs, but it has been walled up now, in consequence of stories of persons having been lost there.

A ruin on the cliff near the Villa Savorelli, is shown as the building in which Charlemagne staid when he was on his way to Rome in the time of his "great father" Adrian I. In a wood below is the Grotta d'Orlando, a cave to which the great hero of chivalrous romance is supposed to have been lured by the witcheries of a beautiful maiden of Sutri of whom he was enamoured, and where he was shut up by her. Another story says that the Sutri maiden was not the love but the mother of Orlando, and that the Paladin was born here.

But tradition is wonderfully alive at Sutri. The house of Pontius Pilate is shown, and to the curse which he brought upon his own people, it is said that the lawless nature is due for which the natives of Sutri have ever since been remarkable. At a corner of the principal street is the head of a beast, be it ass or sheep, which is believed always to be watching the hiding-place of great treasure with its stone eyes, but the authorities of the town, who will not search for it themselves, have forbidden all other enterprise in that direction.

Some of the old palaces have beautifully-wrought cressets still projecting from their walls. In a small piazza is a grand sarcophagus, adorned with winged griffins, as a foun

tain. The dirty Cathedral has a lofty tower with trefoiled windows, and an opus-alexandrinum pavement. It contains a portrait of Benedict VII., who was a native of Sutri, and of the canonized Dominican, Pius V., who was its bishop for five years.

It is about an hour's drive from Sutri to Ronciglione, retracing the road by which we came for some distance. Here the little inn of the Aquila Nera is a tolerable resting-place, and though the rooms are humble, the people are most civil and anxious to please. There is a handsome cathedral of the last century, and a large fountain in the upper town, and below the inn is one of the deep ravines so peculiar and apparently so necessary to Etruscan cities, perforated with tombs, and with a ruined castle (La Rocca) and an old church (La Providenza) clinging to its sides.

It is most pleasant in these old places to have plenty of time, and no fixed plans to tie one down. The walks in the still evening light along the edge of these wonderful gorges are so inexpressibly charming, and the power of resting from the glowing mid-day heat in the great shady churches. Even