ine marshes now so lonely, were then covered with inhabitants. Veiae,
long the rival of Rome, and which was only taken after a siege as
protracted as that of Troy by Camillus at the head of fifty thousand
men, stood only ten miles from the Capitol. The Pontine marshes were
inhabited by thirty nations. The freehold of Cincinnatus, the Sabine
farm, stood in the now desolate plain at the foot of the Alban Mount. So
rich were the harvests, so great the agricultural booty to be gathered
in the plains around Rome, that for two hundred years after the
foundation of the city, it was the great object of their foreign wars to
gain possession of it, and on that account they were generally begun in
autumn. Montesquieu has observed, that it was the long and desperate
wars which the Romans carried on for three centuries with the Sabines,
Latines, Veientes, and other people in their neighbourhood, which by
slow degrees gave them the hardihood and discipline which enabled them
afterwards to subdue the world. The East was an easy conquest, the Gauls
themselves could be repelled, Hannibal in the end overcome, after the
tribes of Latium had been vanquished. But the district in which the
hardy races dwelt, who so long repelled, and maintained a doubtful
conflict with the future masters of the world, is now a desert. It could
not in its whole extent furnish men to fill a Roman cohort. Rome has
emerged from its long decay after the fall of the Western Empire; the
terrors of the Vatican, the shrine of St Peter, have again attracted the
world to the Eternal City; and the most august edifice ever raised by
the hands of man to the purposes of religion, has been reared within its
walls. But the desolate Campagna is still unchanged.

Novelists and romance-writers have for centuries exhausted their
imaginative and descriptive powers in developing the feelings which this
extraordinary phenomenon, in the midst of the classic land of Italy,
awakens. They have spoken of desolation as the fitting shroud of
departed greatness; of the mournful feelings which arise on approaching
the seat of lost empire; of the shades of the dead alone tenanting the
scene of so much glory. Such reflections arise unbidden in the mind; the
most unlettered traveller is struck with the melancholy impression. An
eloquent Italian has described this striking spectacle:--"A vast
solitude, stretching for miles, as far as the eye can reach. No shelter,
no resting-place, no defence fo