ian
stands opposite, to shew that he could likewise excel in the pathetic.
Titian's famous Magdalen, of which the King of France boasts one copy, a
noble family at Venice another, is protested by the Roman connoisseurs
to reside here only; but why should not the artist be fond of repeating
so fine an idea? Guercino's Sybil however, intelligently pensive, and
sweetly sensible, is the single figure I should prefer to them all.

Before we quit the Capitol, it is pity not to name Marforio; broken,
old, and now almost forgotten: though once companion, or rather
respondent to Pasquin, and once, a thousand years before those days, a
statue of the river _Nar_, as his recumbent posture testifies; not _Mars
in the forum_, as has been by some supposed. The late Pope moved him
from the street, and shut him up with his betters in the Capitol.

Of Trajan and Antonine's Pillars what can one say? That St. Peter and
St. Paul stand on the tops of each, setting forth that uncertainty of
human affairs which they preached in their life-time, and shewing that
_they_, who were once the objects of contempt and abhorrence, are now
become literally _the head stones of the corner_; being but too
profoundly venerated in that very city, which once cruelly persecuted,
and unjustly put them to death. Let us then who look on them recollect
their advice, and set our affections on a place of greater stability.
The columns are of very unequal excellence, that of Trajan's confessedly
the best; one grieves to think he never saw it himself, as few princes
were less puffed up by well-deserved praise than he; but dying at
Seleucia of a dysenteric fever, his ashes were brought home, and kept on
the top of his own pillar in a gilt vase; which Sextus Quintus with more
zeal than taste took down, I fear destroyed, and placed St. Peter there.
Apollodorus was the architect of the elegant structure, on which, says
Ammianus Marcellinus, the Gods themselves gazed with wonder, seeing
that nothing but heaven itself was finer. "_Singularem sub omni caelo
structuram etiam numinum ascensione mirabilem_."

I know not whether this is the proper place to mention that the good
Pope Gregory, who added to the possession of every cardinal virtue the
exertion of every Christian one, having looked one day with peculiar
stedfastness at this column, and being naturally led to reflect on his
character to whose honour it was erected, felt just admiration of a mind
so noble; and retiri