tly
you set foot in your hotel, and never quits you while you remain in the
city, there is also a special cicerone belonging to each monument--nay,
almost to each part of a monument. It may, therefore, be easily imagined
there is no scarcity of guides at the Colosseum, that wonder of all
ages, which Martial thus eulogizes: "Let Memphis cease to boast the
barbarous miracles of her pyramids, and the wonders of Babylon be talked
of no more among us; all must bow to the superiority of the gigantic
labor of the Caesars, and the many voices of Fame spread far and wide
the surpassing merits of this incomparable monument."

As for Albert and Franz, they essayed not to escape from their
ciceronian tyrants; and, indeed, it would have been so much the more
difficult to break their bondage, as the guides alone are permitted to
visit these monuments with torches in their hands. Thus, then, the
young men made no attempt at resistance, but blindly and confidingly
surrendered themselves into the care and custody of their conductors.
Albert had already made seven or eight similar excursions to the
Colosseum, while his less favored companion trod for the first time in
his life the classic ground forming the monument of Flavius Vespasian;
and, to his credit be it spoken, his mind, even amid the glib loquacity
of the guides, was duly and deeply touched with awe and enthusiastic
admiration of all he saw; and certainly no adequate notion of these
stupendous ruins can be formed save by such as have visited them, and
more especially by moonlight, at which time the vast proportions of the
building appear twice as large when viewed by the mysterious beams of
a southern moonlit sky, whose rays are sufficiently clear and vivid to
light the horizon with a glow equal to the soft twilight of an eastern
clime. Scarcely, therefore, had the reflective Franz walked a hundred
steps beneath the interior porticoes of the ruin, than, abandoning
Albert to the guides (who would by no means yield their prescriptive
right of carrying their victims through the routine regularly laid down,
and as regularly followed by them, but dragged the unconscious visitor
to the various objects with a pertinacity that admitted of no appeal,
beginning, as a matter of course, with the Lions' Den, and finishing
with Caesar's "Podium,"), to escape a jargon and mechanical survey
of the wonders by which he was surrounded, Franz ascended a
half-dilapidated staircase, and, leaving the