Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/38

 . 29, 1861.]  of such public-spirited, self-commemorating authorities, became a favourite summer residence for the worn-out statesmen and citizens of Rome? Cicero writes to tell Atticus of his intention to spend some days at his suburban retreat there. The poet Martial styles a nephew his neighbour twice over, since they lived close to each other both in Rome and in old Ficulea. What a venerable city! which in the days of Martial was distinguished by the epithet of “the old!”

Next come the boys and girls of the public schools. The Ficulensian territory had been given long before by the Senate to Appius Claudius, as a home for the crowd of hungry clients which had followed him up from the Sabine country. It is almost certain, therefore, that some of these school children were their descendants. If so, the old Claudian blood must have been strangely sweetened in their veins by lapse of time, so as to make possible the precocious burst of loyalty with which they greet the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in a tablet of thanksgiving. It was but little to call his majesty Sovereign Pontiff; to respect him as tribune, as consul; to address him as a most excellent and most indulgent Prince. These youthful courtiers give a retrospective character to their flattery by burning incense to his hereditary greatness. They salute him as the son of the godlike Antoninus Pius, the grandson of the godlike Hadrian, the great-grandson of the godlike Trajan, the Parthian, the great-great-grandson of the godlike Nerva. It would appear that emperors in those days lived to be called not so much the nephews of their uncles, as the great-great-grand-sons of their great-great-grandmother’s husband. It may be that the lowest form boys of the Ficulensian school had been set to calculate according to the De Morgan of the day the precise amount of divinity enshrined in their Emperor. Given four imperial ancestors, each rejoicing in divine attributes, how divine must that emperor be who claimed descent from all four!

The stage upon which this goodly company of statesmen, poets, priests, youths and maidens played their respective parts, was not unworthy of their buskins and real life masks. The hilly road which the good priest had subdued, once crossed the little rivulet whose banks are now shaded by a few stunted trees. The excavators have laid bare close to these trees the pavements of what had been once luxurious bath-rooms. The masonry of the walls has fallen a prey to devastation and time, but the floors of four large apartments have escaped uninjured. In the first apartment are represented in mosaic seven baskets filled with fruit and flowers, with two birds of light plumage resting on the flowers of one of them, the other six being arranged in graceful order around. Outside all the vases and surrounding them runs a large circlet formed of leafy sprays, garlanded together, and relieved with gay colours all about. In each of the four corners chubby heads, with winged temples and swollen puffy cheeks, proclaim themselves to be the four winds. On the floor of the next apartment, Theseus and the Minotaur are engaged in deadly combat in the Labyrinth, the winding mazes of which, by a graceful treatment, form as it were a frame for the group depicted within. Neptune and Antiope figure in the third room; the fourth exhibits a man of colossal size, in a state of the most intense nervous agitation. The unearthly group of fantastic, uncanny, sea monsters that surround him, at once put us in mind of poor Proteus engaged in tending his unruly herd. The walls were coated with delicate slabs of the rarest marbles, with a zone of rosso antico above, the scattered fragment still remaining attesting the magnificence of the whole. A slab of porta santa is still to be found near the leaden pipes that conveyed the water to the baths.

But who were the inmates of this dwelling? Who were they to whose splendid ease these baths once ministered? What their tastes? their histories? their lives? To their tastes nothing beyond what we have described remains to witness, save a marble head crowned with laurel, two heads of aged women, and some crushed fragments of a large and exquisitely chiselled statue. Of themselves we know nothing. In this less fortunate than the very bricks of the walls, which still bear impressed upon them the mark of the furnace in which they were burned, the owners of this place have left no certain traces of themselves behind. There are, indeed, some handsful of ashes in the mortuary urns close by, but who shall say whether they belong to master or to slave? All that remains of the history of Ficulea and of its long career of activity is written in shattered mosaics, mutilated marbles, and human ashes.

2em

Buxton there is much water, and a gentleman residing there, desirous of knowing how to prevent that water from bursting supply-pipes by the action of frost, has written for a specification of the plan indicated by me in a former paper. Possibly, apropos of Christmas weather, a recipe after the manner of Mrs. Glasse may serve for others as well as my correspondent.

We all know that water in motion does not freeze unless under a degree of frost rarely experienced in England. Even in New York the proprietors of the Croton aqueduct enjoin the housekeepers whom they supply to suffer the water to run off as fast as it can during frost, in order to save the pipes from casualties. Now it is possible to attain sufficient motion without wasting the water, by simply inducing circulation by heat. When the ball-cock in the cistern is closed, the water in the pipe above it is motionless. At that point should be attached a small cistern of thin copper, containing, say, a quart or half a gallon of water, which may be a sphere like a ball-cock, or of any convenient form to apply beneath it a gas jet of sufficient power to heat the water and keep up a circulation. If this gas jet be kept constantly burning in frosty weather, the water cannot freeze, and the pipes will not burst. The small heating-cistern must, of course, be placed at the lowest point of the pipe. 2em