ook possession of them on the day when
Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its
origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary
Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but
the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in
blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations,
by captives and slaves of subject races.

The Rome we see today owes its mystery, its sadness and its charm to six
and twenty centuries of history, mostly filled with battle, murder and
sudden death, deeds horrible in that long-past present which we try to
call up, but alternately grand, fascinating and touching now, as we
shape our scant knowledge into visions and fill out our broken dreams
with the stuff of fancy. In most men's minds, perhaps, the charm lies in
that very confusion of suggestions, for few indeed know Rome so well as
to divide clearly the truth from the legend in her composition. Such
knowledge is perhaps altogether unattainable in any history; it is most
surely so here, where city is built on city, monument upon monument,
road upon road, from the heart of the soil upwards--the hardened lava
left by many eruptions of life; where the tablets of Clio have been
shattered again and again, where fire has eaten, and sword has hacked,
and hammer has bruised ages of records out of existence, where even the
race and type of humanity have changed and have been forgotten twice and
three times over.

Therefore, unless one have half a lifetime to spend in patient study and
deep research, it is better, if one come to Rome, to feel much than to
try and know a little, for in much feeling there is more human truth
than in that dangerous little knowledge which dulls the heart and
hampers the clear instincts of natural thought. Let him who comes hither
be satisfied with a little history and much legend, with rough warp of
fact and rich woof of old-time fancy, and not look too closely for the
perfect sum of all, where more than half the parts have perished for
ever.

It matters not much whether we know the exact site of Virgil's
Laurentum; it is more interesting to remember how Commodus, cruel,
cowardly and selfish, fled thither from the great plague, caring not at
all that his people perished by tens of thousands in the city, since he
himself was safe, with the famous Galen to take care of him. We can
leave the task of tracing the encl