it is as well to complete the task of excavation. Much has been done since I was here last, and workmen are in constant employ. I wish you could see the chief among them. Imagine an Indian file of fifty old men in the last stage of decrepitude, grey-headed, bent-shouldered, and feeble-legged, each rolling a small wheelbarrow, creeping along so slow, and yet that extreme slowness appearing an exertion for them.
From the Forum we ascended the hill of the Capitol, and, with some trouble, got the custode, and mounted the tower of the Campidoglio. We looked round, and fancied how, from this height, the patricians and consuls of Old Rome watched the advance of marauding parties that wound out from the ravines of the hills, or whose spears and helmets glittered above the brow of the Janicular hill; and the cry of the Sabines, or fiercer and more terrible, of the Gauls, made the populace gather in the Forum below, and give their names to be inscribed as soldiers for instant fight. The Tiber glitters in the distance, and Soracte rising from out the plain,
“Heaves like a long-swept wave, about to break,
And on the curl hangs pausing.”[1]
I never look at the ridge of Sant’ Oreste, (as it
- ↑ Childe Harold, Canto IV.
