ngs.
And doubtless this explanation was correct. Yet the pleasure of these
little pedantic and artistic mummeries, which took place in suburban
gardens, while the townsfolk streamed in the hot June nights, decked
with bunches of cloves and of lavender, to make bonfires in the empty
places near the Lateran, little guessing that their ancestors had
once done the same in honour of the neighbouring Venus--the innocent
childishness of these learned men was perhaps spiced, for some
individuals at least, by a momentary belief in the gods of the old
poets, by a sudden forbidden fervour for the exiled divinities of Virgil
and Ovid, under whose reign the world had been young, men had been free
to love and think, and Rome, now the object of the world's horror and
contempt, had been the world's triumphant mistress. But these had been
mere mummeries, mere child's play, and the soul of Filarete had thirsted
for a reality. He could not have answered had you asked whether he
believed in the absolute existence and power of the old gods, any more
than whether he disbelieved in the power of Christ and His avenging
angels; his cultivated and sceptical mind was, after all, in a state of
disorder similar to that of Domenico's ignorance. All that he knew with
certainty was that Christ and His worship represented to him all that
was unnatural, cruel, foolish, and hypocritical; while the gods were
associated with every thought of liberty, of beauty, and of glory. And
so, one evening, after working up still further the enthusiasm, the
passionate desire of his friend, he told Domenico that, if he chose, he
too perhaps might see a god.

In his antiquarian rambles Filarete had discovered, a mile or two
outside the southern gates of Rome, a subterranean chamber, richly
adorned with stuccoes--known nowadays as the tomb of certain members of
the Flavian family, but which, thanks to the defective knowledge of his
day and the habit of seeing people buried in churches, the humanist had
mistaken for a temple--intact, and scarcely desecrated, of the Eleusinian
Bacchus. Above its vaults, barely indicated by a higher mound in the
waving ground of the pasture land, had once stood a Christian church, as
ancient almost as the supposed temple below, whose Byzantine columns lay
half hidden by the high grass, and the walls of whose apse had become
overgrown by ivy and weeds, the nest of lazy snakes. The Gothic soldiers,
Arians or heathens, who had burned down, in