ed
mount. It was as if Augustus were again rising from the tomb, once more
master of the world, with a Sacred College of Cardinals resuscitating the
Roman Senate. In the twelfth century the Septizonium belonged to some
Benedictine monks, and was sold by them to the powerful Frangipani
family, who fortified it as they had already fortified the Colosseum and
the arches of Constantine and Titus, thus forming a vast fortress round
about the venerable cradle of the city. And the violent deeds of civil
war and the ravages of invasion swept by like whirlwinds, throwing down
the walls, razing the palaces and towers. And afterwards successive
generations invaded the ruins, installed themselves in them by right of
trover and conquest, turned them into cellars, store-places for forage,
and stables for mules. Kitchen gardens were formed, vines were planted on
the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial
halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the
overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage
of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed
to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and
vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot
sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained,
whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of
Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.

A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength,
pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin--a world for ever swept away! He
wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could
thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting
them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those
masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of
admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were--caught progressively
by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk
beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had
heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a
helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain
were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a
new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become
depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the
edifices whic