ural retreat a score of
miles from the city; and from the stone balustrade on the other side
you see all Rome at your feet with its sea of brown houses, and beyond
the picturesque roofs and the hidden river rising up the great mass of
the Vatican buildings and the mighty dome of St. Peter's, which
catches like a mountain peak the last level gold of the sunset, and
flashes it back like an illumination, while all the intermediate view
is in shadow. No wonder that the Pincian Hill is the favourite
promenade of Rome, and that on week-days and Sunday afternoons you see
multitudes of people showing every phase of Roman life, and hundreds
of carriages containing the flower of the Roman aristocracy, with
beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, crowding the piazza
below, ascending the winding road, and driving or walking round
between the palms and the pines, over the garden-paths, to the sound
of band music. And thus they continue to amuse themselves till the sun
has set, and the first sound of the bells of Ave Maria is heard from
the churches; and then they wind their way homewards.

We pass out from the Piazza through the Porta del Popolo, the only way
by which strangers used to approach Rome from the north. It was indeed
a more suitable entrance into the Eternal City than the present one;
for no human being, with a spark of imagination, would care to obtain
his first view of the city of his dreams from the outside of a great
bustling railway station. But the Porta del Popolo had annoyances of
its own that seemed hardly less incongruous. One had to run the
gauntlet of the custom-house here, and to practise unheard-of
briberies upon the venal douaniers of the Pope before being allowed to
pass on to his hotel. And the first glimpse of the city from this
point did not come up to one's expectations, being very much like that
of any commonplace modern capital, without a ruin visible, or any sign
or suggestion of the mistress of the world. The Porta del Popolo
almost marks the position of the old Flaminian gate, through which
passed the great northern road of Italy, constructed by the Roman
censor, C. Flaminius, two hundred and twenty years before Christ,
extending as far as Rimini, a distance of two hundred and ten miles.
Through that old gate, and along that old road, the Roman cohorts
passed to conquer Britain, then a small isle inhabited by savage
tribes. Hardly any path save that to Jerusalem has been trodden by so
ma