nake-like over the country, and
smites with deadly fever whoever is so foolhardy as to sleep on the
Campagna during its continuance. These marshes, I understand, are
increasing; and the malaria is increasing in consequence. That fatal
vapour now comes every summer to the gates of Rome: it covers a certain
quarter of the city, which, I was told, is uninhabitable during its
continuance; and if nothing be done to lessen the malaria at its source,
it will, some century or half century after this, envelope in its
pestilential folds the whole of the Eternal City, and the traveller will
gaze with awe on the blackened ruins of Rome, as he does on those of
Babylon on the plain of Chaldea: so, I say, will he see the heaps of
Rome on the wasted bosom of the Campagna deserted by man, and become the
dwelling-place of the dragons and satyrs of the wilderness. But matters
are not come to this yet. An English company (for every attempted
improvement in Rome has originated with English skill and capital) was
formed some years ago, to drain the Pontine Marshes. They went to the
Vatican; and Sir Humphrey Davy being then in Rome, they induced him to
accompany them, in the hope that his high scientific authority would
have some weight with the Pontiff. They stated their object, which was
to drain the Pontine Marshes. They assured the Pontiff it was
practicable to a very large extent; and they pointed out its manifold
advantages, as regarded the health of the country, and other things.
"Drain the Pontine Marshes!" exclaimed Pope Gregory, in a tone of
surprise and horror at this new project of these everlastingly scheming
English heretics,--"Drain the Pontine Marshes! God made the Pontine
Marshes; and if He had intended them to be drained, He would have
drained them himself."

The barrenness that afflicts all countries which are the seat of a false
religion is a public testimony of the Divine indignation against
idolatry. For the sin of man the earth was originally cursed: and
wherever wicked systems exist, there a manifest curse rests upon the
earth. The Mohammedan apostacy and the Roman apostacy are now seated in
the midst of wildernesses. And, to make the fact more striking, these
lands, which are deserts now, were anciently the best cultivated on the
globe. There stood the proudest of earth's cities,--there the arts
flourished,--and there men were free after the measure of ancient
freedom. All this is at an end long since. Ruins, silence,