12. Ponte Nomentano in the Campagna, three miles from Rome. This, no doubt, is the most romantic of all the fortified bridges that Brangwyn has painted. Both bridge and castle are mediæval, but they rise over the willow-frilled Anio, a river haunted by myths which to the ancients were sacred truths. It was in the Anio that Rhea Silvia passed from the brief hours of her mortality into the life of a goddess; and to this river Silvia confided her two children, Romulus and Remus, the twin Moses of Roman story, who were carried in their cradle to the Tiber, where other waters bore them on and on till at last they came to land under the fig tree at the foot of the Palatine hill. What a delightful legend to be whispered by the current of the prattling Anio below the uncouth stones of the Nomentano! What other war-bridge has been united to such a gracious myth? And history as well as legend has been busy on the banks of the Anio. Into this river the ashes of Marius were thrown by the adherents of Sulla; and beyond the bridge, on the right bank, west of the Via Nomentana, is a very famous hillside, the Mons Sacer, to which the plebeians retreated, as to a fortified place, when they asserted their right to tame the patricians. Their first great strike, or secession, occupied four months in the year 549 B.C., when four thousand of them encamped on the friendly hill, leaving the crops unharvested, and the city without a garrison. Mount Sacer became sacred to the People of Rome, and to the historic sense it is the Hill of Liberty, sanctified by the first brave ideals of a democratic justice. Yet in recent times vulgarians have taken hold of Mount Sacer, and have carted it away by the ton to be used as building material. As for the Ponte Nomentano, he is nothing more than a burly soldier, a common man-at-arms. The mediæval engineer was uninspired by an enchanted site, and gave the whole of his attention to the pronged battlements. He had no feeling for proportion, and no liking for a stern eloquence of line such as we find in the noble castle of Chenonceaux, a masterpiece of the French Renaissance, whose long wing is carried by a bridge of five round arches, and whose turreted portion is pierced by a single arcade. 13. The bridges of Laroque, near Cahors, on the river Lot. In this rapid sketch Brangwyn represents a riverside Gibraltar upon which an ancient village stands, partly on bridges. Its value in “the good old times” as a stronghold fortified by Nature is patent, and the watch-towers have an unsleeping alertness that looks out upon the world through one eye or window. I should like to know who built the first bridge at Laroque. There is a Romanesque form in the arch drawn by Brangwyn, and the Romans were active in the neighbourhood. Over the Lot at Divona, now called Cahors, they built a bridge, which perished some years ago in a local storm of party feeling. To imagine Rome with a Gibraltar on the Lot is a great pleasure.