No one, so far as I am aware,--not even the excellent Baracconi,--offers any explanation of the name and device of the Ninth Region. Topographically it is nearly a square, of which the angles are the Pantheon, the corner of Via di Caravita and the Corso, the Palazzo di Venezia, and the corner of the new Via Arenula and Via Florida. Besides the Pantheon it contains some of the most notable buildings erected since the Renascence. Here are the palaces of the Doria, of the Altieri, and the 'Palace of Venice' built by Paul the Second, that Venetian Barbo, whose name may have nicknamed the racing horses of the Carnival. Here were the strongholds of the two great rival orders, the Dominicans and the Jesuits, the former in the Piazza della Minerva, the latter in the Piazza del Gesu, and in the Collegio Romano; and here at the present day, in the buildings of the old rivals, significantly connected by an arched passage, are collected the greatest libraries of the city. That of the Dominicans, wisely left in their care, has been opened to the public; the other, called after Victor Emmanuel, is a vast collection of books gathered together by plundering the monastic institutions of Italy at the time of the disestablishment. The booty--for it was nothing else--was brought in carts, mostly in a state of the utmost confusion, and the books and manuscripts were roughly stacked in vacant rooms on the ground floor of the Collegio Romano, in charge of a porter. Not until a poor scholar, having bought himself two ounces of butter in the Piazza Navona, found the greasy stuff wrapped in an autograph letter of Christopher Columbus, did it dawn upon the authorities that the porter was deliberately selling priceless books and manuscripts as waste paper, by the hundredweight, to provide himself with the means of getting drunk. That was about the year 1880. The scandal was enormous, a strict inquiry was made, justice was done as far as possible, and an official account of the affair was published in a 'Green Book'; but the amount of the loss was unknown, it may have been incalculable, and it was undeniably great. The names visibly recorded in the Region have vast suggestions in them,--Ignatius Loyola, the Dominicans, Venice, Doria, Agrippa, and the buildings themselves, which are the record, will last for ages; the opposition of Jesuit and Inquisitor, under one name or another, and of both by the people, will live as long as humanity itself. The crisis in the history of the Inquisition in Rome followed closely upon the first institution of the Tribunal, and seventeen years after Paul the Fourth had created the Court, by a Papal Bull of July twenty-first, 1542, the people burned the Palace of the Inquisition and threatened to destroy the Dominicans and their monastery. [Illustration: THE PANTHEON]