d with the horns on, and the garland just as she
died, upon the temple door as an ornament. From that time, it seems, the
ornament called _Caput Bovis_ was in a manner consecrated to Diana, and
her particular votaries used it on their tombs. Nor could one easily
account for the decorations of many Roman sarcophagi, till one
recollects that they were probably adapted to that divinity in whose
temple they were to be placed, rather than to the particular person
occupying the tomb, or than to our general ideas of death, time, and
eternity. It is probably for this reason that the immense sarcophagus
lately dug up from under the temple of Bacchus without the walls, cut
out of one solid piece of red porphyry, has such gay ornaments round it,
relative to the sacrifices of Bacchus, &c.; and I fancy these stone
coffins, if we may call them so, were often made ready and sold to any
person who wished to bury their friend, and who chose some story
representing the triumph of whatever deity they devoted themselves to.
Were the modern inhabitants of Rome who venerate St. Lorenzo, St.
Sebastiano, &c. to place, not uncharacteristically at all--a gridiron,
or an arrow on their tombstone, it might puzzle succeeding antiquarians,
and yet be nothing out of the way in the least.

[Footnote AF: A circumstance alluded to and parodied by Ben Johnson in
his Alchemist. See the conduct of Dapper, &c.]

Of the Egyptian obelisks at Rome I will not strive to give any account,
or even any idea. They are too numerous, too wonderful, too learned for
me to talk about; but I must not forbear to mention the broken thing
which lies down somewhere in a heap of rubbish, and is said to be the
greatest rarity in Rome, column, or _obelisk_ and the greatest antiquity
surely, if 1630 years before the birth of Christ be its date; as that
was but two centuries after the invention of letters by _Memnon_, and
just about the time that Joseph the favourite of Pharaoh died. There is
a sphinx upon it, however, mighty clearly expressed; and some one said,
how strange it was, if the world was no older than we think it, that
they should, in so early a stage of existence, represent, or even
imagine to themselves a compound animal[AG]: though the chimaera came in
play when the world was pretty young too, and the Prophet Isaiah speaks
of centaurs; but that was long after even Hesiod's time.

[Footnote AG: The ornaments of the ark and tabernacle exhibit much
improvement in the