&c." "Hold, hold friend," replies the King of Sweden; "I am one of those
cursed Goths myself you know: but what were your Roman nobles a-doing,
I would ask, when they laboured to destroy an edifice like this, and
build their palaces with its materials?"

The baths of Livia are still elegantly designed round her small
apartments; and one has copies sold of them upon fans; the curiosity of
the original is to see how well the gilding stands; in many places it
appears just finished. These baths are difficult of access somehow; I
never could quite understand how we got in or out of them, but they did
belong to the Imperial palace, which covered this whole Palatine hill,
and here was Nero's golden house, by what I could gather, but of that I
thank Heaven there is no trace left, except some little portion of the
wall, which was 120 feet high, and some marbles in shades, like women's
worsted work upon canvass, very curious, and very wonderful; as all are
natural marbles, and no dye used: the expence must have surpassed
credibility.

The Temple of Vesta, supposed to be the _very_ temple to which Horace
alludes in his second Ode, is a pretty rotunda, and has twenty pillars
fluted of Parian marble: it is now a church, as are most of the heathen
temples.

Such adaptations do not please one, but then it must be allowed and
recollected that one is very hard to please: finding fault is so easy,
and doing right so difficult!

The good Pope Gregory, who feared (by sacred inspiration one would
think) all which should come to pass, broke many beautiful antique
statues, "lest," said he, "induced by change of dress or name perhaps
our Christians may be tempted to adore them:" and we say he was a
blockhead, and burned Livy's decads, and so he did; but he refused all
titles of earthly dignity; he censured the Oriental Patriarchs for
substituting temporal splendours in the place of primitive simplicity;
which he said ought _alone_ to distinguish the followers of Jesus
Christ. He required a strict attention to morality from all his inferior
clergy; observed that those who strove to be first, would end in being
last; and took himself the title of servant to the servants of God.

Well! Sabinian, his successor, once his favourite Nuncio, flung his
books in the fire as soon as he was dead; so his injunctions were obeyed
but while he lived to enforce them; and every day now shews us how
necessary they were: when, even in these enlightened times