Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/363

Rh their historic associations or their beauty and grandeur as works of art.

There is a spot in Rome in which the history of two thousand years may be said to be recorded on the very stones of the pavement and on the hoary ruins which are scattered on it,—I need hardly say I mean the Forum. It is a low valley with the Capitoline Hill on one side and the Palatine Hill on another, and the traveller, the historian, and the antiquarian find themselves lost here in a perfect wilderness of ancient ruins. From the Capitoline Hill to the great Colosseum of Rome, it is scarcely more than five minutes' walk, and in this short walk the modern traveller sees the ruins of an ancient world and an ancient civilization. It was when sitting on a shapeless stone among these ruins that the historian Gibbon was first inspired with the idea of his matchless history; it was when standing amidst these ruins that Byron composed some of the sublimest passages that even he ever wrote. And the most commonplace tourist cannot survey this spot without, for a moment at least, forgetting the present, and being lost in a reverie of the past.

Let us walk along the Via Sacra by which the Vestal Virgins of Rome went in procession in the olden days. Close to the Capitoline Hill is the Tabularium where the famous "Tables of the Law" were recorded, and not far from it is the massive arch of Severus still entire. Three solitary columns are all that are left of the temple of Vespasian, and eight Ionic columns close by are all that remain of the temple of Saturn, Proceeding along