Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/141

Rh a populations of three millions, partly free and partly slaves.

People have in these later times sought in vain to discover the plan of ancient Rome. Time, the ravages of the Barbarians, and above all, those of the Komans and the emperors themselves, have so fundamentally destroyed and plundered the city, that this has become impossible. From a letter written by Raphael to Leo X., I have seen that the former proposed to undertake a picture which should represent the situation and splendor of ancient Rome, and he requests the Pope's aid for this purpose. Raphael is indignant, in his letter, against the manner in which the old grand buildings and works of art are treated. “Marble walls, statues, columns are broken for lime for the use of the new buildings. One may,” he writes, “say that the new Rome is built up with the lime of the old!” Death interrupted Raphael's undertaking, and now its accomplishment is no more to be thought of.

This old, ruinous Rome is immediately surrounded by merely insignificant houses and buildings, mostly inhabited by the poor. Clothes hang to dry around the Forum, and near the Capitoline rock; on the other side of the Via Sacra, rattle the looms of a cotton factory.

The present buildings of the Capitol are executed from drawings of Michael Angelo. The Roman Senate—or rather its shadow—assembles now in the central palace. In the two wings are museums of ancient works of art. I have, from those in the stone museum, merely taken, for my own private museum, two figures,—the head of Augustus as a child, and Augustus in old age; remarkable from