ld that was curious and magnificent, was
for them; the Caesars fed them and diverted them, seeking only to afford
them gratification, and to obtain their acclamations.

A Roman of the middle classes might well regard his emperors as so many
public purveyors, administering his property, relieving him from
troublesome cares, furnishing him at fair rates, or for nothing, with
corn, wine, and oil, giving him sumptuous meals and well-got-up fetes,
providing him with pictures, statues, pantomimists, gladiators, and
lions, resuscitating his "blase" taste every morning with some
surprising novelty, and even occasionally converting themselves into
actors, charioteers, singers, and gladiators for his especial delight.
In order to lodge this group of amateurs in a very suitable to its regal
pretensions, architecture invented original and grand forms. Vast
structures always indicate some corresponding excess, some immoderate
concentration and accumulation of the labor of humanity. Look at the
Gothic cathedrals, the pyramids of Egypt, Paris of the present day, and
the docks of London!

On reaching the end of a long line of narrow streets, white walls, and
deserted gardens, the great ruin appears. There is nothing with which to
compare its form, while the line it describes on the sky is unique. No
mountains, no hills, no edifices, give any idea of it. It resembles all
these; it is a human structure, which time and events have so deformed
and transformed, as to render a natural production. Rising upward in the
air, its moss-stained embossed summit and indented crest with its wide
crevices, a red, mournful, decayed mass, silently reposes in a shroud of
clouds.

You enter, and it seems as if you had never seen anything in the world
so grand. The Coliseum itself is no approach to it, so much do a
multiplicity and irregularity of ruins add to the vastness of the vast
enclosure. Before these heaps of red corroded masonry, these round
vaults spanning the air like the arches of a mighty bridge before these
crumbling walls, you wonder whether an entire city did not once exist
there. Frequently an arch has fallen, and the monstrous mass that
sustained it still stands erect, exposing remnants of staircases and
fragments of arcades, like so many shapeless, deformed houses.

Sometimes it is cleft in the center, and a portion appears about to fall
and roll away, like a huge rock. Sections of wall and pieces of
tottering arches cling to it and