other reason, it is said that the Prince
Farnese, who is the present owner of this seat, will keep his own family
in the chair. There are undertakers in Rome who often purchase the
digging of fields, gardens, or vineyards, where they find any likelihood
of succeeding, and some have been known to arrive at great estates by
it. They pay according to the dimensions of the surface they are to
break up; and after having made essays into it, as they do for coal in
England, they rake into the most promising parts of it, tho they often
find, to their disappointment, that others have been beforehand with
them. However, they generally gain enough by the rubbish and bricks,
which the present architects value much beyond those of a modern make,
to defray the charges of their search.

I was shown two spaces of ground, where part of Nero's golden house
stood, for which the owner has been offered an extraordinary sum of
money. What encouraged the undertakers, are several very ancient trees,
which grow upon the spot, from whence they conclude that these
particular tracts of ground must have lain untouched for some ages. It
is pity there is not something like a public register, to preserve the
memory of such statues as have been found from time to time, and to mark
the particular places where they have been taken up, which would not
only prevent many fruitless searches for the future, but might often
give a considerable light into the quality of the place, or the design
of the statue.

But the great magazine for all kinds of treasure, is supposed to be the
bed of the Tiber. We may be sure, when the Romans lay under the
apprehensions of seeing their city sacked by a barbarous enemy, as they
have done more than once, that they would take care to bestow such of
their riches this way as could best bear the water, besides what the
insolence of a brutish conqueror may be supposed to have contributed,
who had an ambition to waste and destroy all the beauties of so
celebrated a city. I need not mention the old common-shore of Rome,
which ran from all parts of the town with the current and violence of an
ordinary river, nor the frequent inundations of the Tiber, which may
have swept away many of the ornaments of its banks, nor the several
statues that the Romans themselves flung into it, when they would
revenge themselves on the memory of an ill citizen, a dead tyrant, or a
discarded favorite.

At Rome they have so general an opinion of the r