to fill, and elegantly-skilful to adorn such a fabric
as this Coliseum which I have just been contemplating, were yet
contented and even happy to view from its well-arranged seats,
exhibitions capable of giving nothing but disgust and horror;--lions
rending unarmed wretches in pieces; or, to the still deeper disgrace of
poor Humanity, those wretches armed unwillingly against each other, and
dying to divert a brutal populace.

These reflections upon Pagan days and classical cruelties do not disturb
however the peace of an old hermit, who has chosen one of these
close-concealed recesses for his habitation, and accordingly dwells,
dismally enough, in a hole seldom visited by travellers, and certainly
never enquired about by the natives. I stumbled on his strange apartment
by mere chance, and asked him why he had chosen it? He had been led in
early youth, he said, to reflect upon the miseries suffered by the
original professors of Christianity; the tortures inflicted on them in
this horrible amphitheatre, and the various vicissitudes of Rome since:
that he had dedicated himself to these meditations: that he had left the
world seventeen years, never stirring from his cell but to buy food,
which he eat alone and sparingly, and to pay his devotions in the _Via
Crucis_, for so the old Arena is now called; a simple plain wooden cross
occupying the middle of it, and round the Circus twelve neat, not
splendid chapels; a picture to each, representing the various stages of
our Saviour's passion. Such are the meek triumphs of our meek religion!
And that such substitutes should have replaced the African savages,
tigers, hyaenas, &c. and Roman gladiators, not less ferocious than their
four-legged antagonists, I am quite as willing to rejoice at as the
hermit: They must be better antiquarians too than I am, who regret that
a nunnery now covers the spot where ambitious Tullia drove over the
bleeding body of her murdered parent,

Pressit et inductis membra paterna rotis:

That nunnery, supported by the arch of Nerva, which is all that is now
left standing of that Emperor's Forum.

I must not however quit the Coliseum, without repeating what passed
between the King of Sweden and his Roman _laquais de place_ when he was
here; and the fellow, in the true cant of his Ciceroneship, exclaimed as
they looked up, "_Ah Maesta!_ what cursed Goths those were that tore
away so many fine things here, and pulled down such magnificent pillars,