but Jins or Genii, raised them in the wilderness in waywardness or mockery.
But Rome will most effectually test the correctness of our principle. It is full of memorials of the past. Baths, hippodromes, amphitheatres, markets, exchanges, forums, aqueducts, gates, mausoleums, basilicas, prisons, the treasury, the Græcostasis, triumphal arches and columns are still standing, but more than all, temples of every form and dimension, round and quadrangular, vast and small. Sometimes these buildings are isolated, sometimes they stand in groups as they do in the Roman forum. They cover the seven hills, filling its vineyards and gardens. Yet of the dwellings of the inhabitants nothing beyond shapeless lumps here and there remains.
Descending thence to the Campus Martius, where the later city stood, we find the magnificent Pantheon almost intact. Its bronze ceilings have been stripped off within only a few centuries, but its noble portico, its huge bronze gates, its marble lining and its elegant columns stand in all their integrity and solemn beauty, while its precious pavement is unworn by the showers which, since the beginning of the Christian era, have poured down on it through its open, unglazed dome. Yet it is situated in the midst of a modern city, without a vestige, much less a fragment, of any coeval private building around it. More than ten generations of houses have probably succeeded one another, while it has remained unshaken.
What, I ask again, has become of the dwellings of contemporaries of these great works? The man who
