tures of
brick and stone; and we can name the modern turrets that were raised on
the triumphal monuments of Julius Caesar, Titus, and the Antonines. With
some slight alterations, a theatre, an amphitheatre, a mausoleum, was
transformed into a strong and spacious citadel. I need not repeat that
the mole of Adrian has assumed the title and form of the castle of St.
Angelo; the Septizonium of Severus was capable of standing against a
royal army; the sepulchre of Metella has sunk under its outworks; the
theatres of Pompey and Marcellus were occupied by the Savelli and Ursini
families; and the rough fortress has been gradually softened to the
splendor and elegance of an Italian palace. Even the churches were
encompassed with arms and bulwarks, and the military engines on the roof
of St. Peter's were the terror of the Vatican and the scandal of the
Christian world. Whatever is fortified will be attacked; and whatever is
attacked may be destroyed. Could the Romans have wrested from the popes
the castle of St. Angelo, they had resolved by a public decree to
annihilate that monument of servitude. Every building of defense was
exposed to a siege; and in every siege the arts and engines of
destruction were laboriously employed. After the death of Nicholas the
Fourth, Rome, without a sovereign or a senate, was abandoned six months
to the fury of civil war. "The houses," says a cardinal and poet of the
times, "were crushed by the weight and velocity of enormous stones; the
walls were perforated by the strokes of the battering-ram; the towers
were involved in fire and smoke; and the assailants were stimulated by
rapine and revenge." The work was consummated by the tyranny of the
laws; and the factions of Italy alternately exercised a blind and
thoughtless vengeance on their adversaries, whose houses and castles
they razed to the ground. In comparing the _days_ of foreign, with the
_ages_ of domestic hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have
been far more ruinous to the city; and our opinion is confirmed by the
evidence of Petrarch. "Behold," says the laureate, "the relics of Rome,
the image of her pristine greatness! neither time nor the Barbarian can
boast the merit of this stupendous destruction: it was perpetrated by
her own citizens, by the most illustrious of her sons; and your
ancestors [he writes to a noble Annibaldi] have done with battering-ram
what the Punic hero could not accomplish with the sword." The influence
of