e distinctly made out, even
at this great distance, by the naked eye. For it must be remembered that
there was in those days no sea-coal to send up its murky smoke-wreaths,
blurring the bright skies with its inky pall; no factories with tall
chimnies, vomiting forth, like mimic Etnas, their pestilential breath,
fatal to vegetable life. Not a cloud hung over the great city; and the
charcoal, sparingly used for cookery, sent forth no visible fumes to
shroud the daylight. So that, as the thin purplish haze was dispersed by
the growing influence of the sunbeams, every line of the far architecture,
even to the carved friezes of the thousand temples, and the rich foliage
of the marble capitals could be observed, distinct and sharp as in a
painted picture.

Nor was this all the charm of the delicious atmosphere; for so pure was
it, that the odours of that flowery hill, wafted upon the wings of the
light northern breeze, blent with the coolness which they caught from the
hundreds of clear fountains, plashing and glittering in every public
place, came to the brow of the young noble, more like the breath of some
enchanted garden in the far-famed Hesperides, than the steam from the
abodes of above a million of busy mortals.

Before him still, though inclining a little to the left hand, lay a
broader hollow, presenting the long vista of the sacred way, leading
directly to the capitol, and thence to the Campus Martius, the green
expanse of which, bedecked with many a marble monument and brazen column,
and already studded with quick moving groups, hurling the disc and
javelin, or reining the fierce war-horse with strong Gaulish curbs, lay
soft and level for half a league in length, till it was bounded far away
by a gleaming reach of the blue Tiber.

Still to the left of this, uprose the Palatine, the earliest settled of
the hills of Rome, with the old walls of Romulus, and the low straw-built
shed, wherein that mighty son of Mars dwelt when he governed his wild
robber-clan; and the bidental marking the spot where lightning from the
monarch of Olympus, called on by undue rites, consumed Hostilius and his
house; were still preserved with reverential worship, and on its eastern
peak, the time-honoured shrine of Stator Jove.

The ragged crest of this antique elevation concealed, it is true, from
sight the immortal space below, once occupied by the marsh of the
Velabrum, but now filled by the grand basilicae and halls of Justice
surro