CHAPTER XIV. We have been waiting for a peculiarly fine day to make an excursion beyond the walls, and this morning, one of the most beautiful that ever dawned, was all that we could desire. Although the seventh of January, yet the sun was shining so warmly, that in our land it would have passed for June, while there was a freshness in the air, which, as Madam de Stael says, "produces something of melody on the We set out for the romantic fountain of Egeria, about three miles from the gates of the City, yet expecting, with the intermediate places of interest, to find full employment for the day. Our course led us past the Capitoline Hill, and through the Roman Forum with its lofty, solitary pillars, gleaming in the sunlight-the Forum, "where once the mightiest spirits met In terrible conflict; this, while Rome was free, We crossed the Via Sacra-passed under the Arches of Titus and Constantine-turned from the Coliseum—and winding round the base of the Palatine Hill, and the mighty ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, entered the Appian Way. Constructed nearly eighteen centuries ago, its solid pavement is now as firm as ever, and we rode over the same stones which in Rome's glorious day were trodden by the trium phal procession, as it slowly passed up to the Capitol. The roads which extended to all parts of the empire were among the few works of utility constructed by the Romans, and these we can see were designed by Providence, that the world should thus devise the means by which the Church was to win it back to herself. "The legions of great Rome were for some centuries toiling with the pickaxe and spade to construct mighty roads by which Apostles might compass the ends of the earth. Those huge arteries were the unconscious preparation which poor blind Paganism was making for the more rapid circulation of the fresh blood that should spring up and stir that monstrous empire, and be an element at once of health and of destruction."* The old Appian Way was distinguished for the splendor of the monuments lining its sides—similar to those now seen in the Street of the Tombs in Pompeii-and Cicero refers to them when he says, in his Tusculan Disputations—“ When you go out of the Porta Capena, and see the tombs of Calatinus, the Scipios, the Servilii, and the Metelli, can you consider that the buried inmates are unhappy?" Let us endeavor then to call back seventeen centuries, and cause to pass before us the scenes of a CLASSICAL FUNERAL, as once it took place on this spot. It is the burial of one of the Metelli in the early age of the Empire, when the practice of interring the body had ceased, and that of burning been substituted in its place. The Libertinarii (undertakers) have performed their duty, and for some days the body, dressed in the official robes which once it wore, has been exposed on a couch in the vestibule of the house, with its feet towards the door, and the branch of Cypress waving above it. But it is now the eighth day, the time for the funeral, and the Appian Way is filled with crowds who have poured out to see the Patrician's burial. At length there *F. W. Faber. |