ng to his devotions in a church not far off, began
praying earnestly for Trajan's soul: till a preternatural voice,
accompanied with rays of light round the altar he knelt at, commanded
his forbearance of further solicitation; assuring him that Trajan's soul
was secure in the care of his Creator. Strange! that those who record,
and give credit to such a story, can yet continue as a duty their
intercessions for the dead!

But I have seen the Coliseo, which would swallow that of pretty Verona;
it is four times as large I am told, and would hold fourscore thousand
spectators. After all the depredations of all the Goths, and afterwards
of the Farnese family, the ruin is gloriously beautiful; possibly more
beautiful than when it was quite whole; there is enough left now for
Truth to repose upon, and a perch for Fancy beside, to fly out from, and
fetch in more.

The orders of its architecture are easily discerned, though the height
of the upper story is truly tremendous; I climbed it once, not to the
top indeed, but till I was afraid to look down from the place I was in,
and penetrated many of its recesses. The modern Italians have not lost
their taste of a prodigious theatre; were they once more a single
nation, they would rebuild _this_ I fancy; for here are all the
conveniencies in _grande_, as they call it, that amaze one even in
_piccolo_ at Milan and Turin: Here were supper-rooms, and taverns, and
shops, and I believe baths; certainly long galleries big enough to drive
a coach round, and places where slaves waited to receive the commands of
masters and ladies, who perhaps if they did not wait to please them,
would scarcely scruple to detain them in the cage of offenders, and
keep them to make sport upon a future day.

The cruelties then exercised on servants at Rome were truly dreadful;
and we all remember reading that in Augustus's time, when he did a
private friend the honour to dine with him, one of the waiters broke a
glass he was about to present full of liquor to the King; at which
offence the master being enraged, suddenly caused him to be seized by
the rest, and thrown instantly out of the window to feed his lampreys,
which lived in a pond on which the apartment looked. Augustus said
nothing at the moment; to punish the nobleman's inhumanity however, he
sent his officers next morning to break every glass in the house: A
curious chastisement enough, and worthy of a nation who, being powerful
to erect, populous