ff chooses to permit himself, stands as in a domain, small
yet perfect. Almost everything within these walls has been built or
completely transformed since the days of Nicholas. But, then as now,
here was the heart and centre of Christendom, the supreme shrine of the
Catholic faith, the home of the spiritual ruler whose sway reaches over
the whole earth. When Nicholas began his reign, the old Church of St.
Peter was the church of the Western world, then, as now, classical
in form, a stately basilica without the picturesqueness and romantic
variety, and also, as we think, without the majesty and grandeur, of a
Gothic cathedral, yet more picturesque if less stupendous in size and
construction, than the present great edifice, so majestic in its own
grave and splendid way, with which, through all the agitations of the
recent centuries, the name of St. Peter has been identified. The earlier
church was full of riches and of great associations, to which the
wonderful St. Peter's we all know can lay claim only as its successor and
supplanter. With its flight of broad steps, its portico and colonnaded
facade crowned with a great tower, it dominated the square, open and
glowing in the sun, without the shelter of the great existing colonnades
or the sparkle of the fountains.

Behind was the little palace begun by Innocent III, to afford a shelter
for the popes in dangerous times, or on occasion to receive the foreign
guests whose object was to visit the shrine of the apostles. Almost
all the buildings then standing have been replaced by greater, yet the
position is the same, the shrine unchanged, though everything else then
existing has faded away, except some portion of the old wall which
enclosed this sacred place in a special sanctity and security, which was
not, however, always respected. The Borgo was the holiest portion of all
the sacred city. It was there that the blood of the martyrs had been
shed, and where from the earliest age of Christianity their memory and
tradition had been preserved. It was not necessary for us to enter into
the question whether St. Peter ever was in Rome, which many writers have
laboriously contested. So far as the record of the Acts of the Apostles
is concerned, there is no evidence at all for or against, but tradition
is all on the side of those who assert it. The position taken by Signor
Lanciani on this point seems to us a very sensible one. "I write about
the monuments of ancient Rome," he say