hey had not been
useless in a great measure to the city and its inhabitants. The walls
still described the old circumference, but the city had descended from
the seven hills into the Campus Martius; and some of the noblest
monuments which had braved the injuries of time were left in a desert,
far remote from the habitations of mankind. The palaces of the senators
were no longer adapted to the manners or fortunes of their indigent
successors: the use of baths and porticos was forgotten; in the sixth
century the games of the theatre, amphitheatre, and circus had been
interrupted; some temples were devoted to the prevailing worship, but
the Christian churches preferred the holy figure of the cross; and
fashion, or reason, had distributed after a peculiar model the cells and
offices of the cloister. Under the ecclesiastical reign, the number of
these pious foundations was enormously multiplied; and the city was
crowded with forty monasteries of men, twenty of women, and sixty
chapters and colleges of canons and priests, who aggravated instead of
relieving the depopulation of the tenth century. But if the forms of
ancient architecture were disregarded by a people insensible of their
use and beauty, the plentiful materials were applied to every call of
necessity or superstition; till the fairest columns of the Ionic and
Corinthian orders, the richest marbles of Paros and Numidia, were
degraded, perhaps to the support of a convent or a stable. The daily
havoc which is perpetrated by the Turks in the cities of Greece and Asia
may afford a melancholy example; and in the gradual destruction of the
monuments of Rome, Sixtus the Fifth may alone be excused for employing
the stones of the Septizonium in the glorious edifice of St. Peter's.
A fragment, a ruin, howsoever mangled or profaned, may be viewed with
pleasure and regret; but the greater part of the marble was deprived of
substance, as well as of place and proportion: it was burnt to lime for
the purpose of cement. Since the arrival of Poggius, the temple of
Concord and many capital structures had vanished from his eyes; and
an epigram of the same age expresses a just and pious fear that the
continuance of this practice would finally annihilate all the monuments
of antiquity. The smallness of their numbers was the sole check on the
demands and depredations of the Romans. The imagination of Petrarch
might create the presence of a mighty people; and I hesitate to believe
that eve