But, let me people those resounding arches, dim passages, and solemn subterraneans, with the past. Here, two thousand years ago, Julius Cæsar kept his military court, with Quæstors, Prefects, and Tribunes, for his secretaries of state; Centurions for his chamberlains; and Augurs for his bishops. On this bank of the stately river, on which no hovel had encroached, but which covered with its unpolluted stream half the landscape, and rolled in quiet majesty to meet the ocean; often stood the man, who was destined to teach the Republican rabble of Rome that they had a master. I leave antiquarians to settle the spot trodden by his iron sandal. I disdain the minute meddling of the men of _fibulæ_ and _frustums_ of pitchers. But I can see--"in my mind's eye, Horatio"--the stately Roman casting many an eager glance eastward, and asking himself, with an involuntary grasp of his hilt, and an unconscious curl of his lip, how long he was to suffer the haranguers of the populace, the pilferers of the public, the hirelings of Cinna and Sylla, and of every man who would hire them, the whole miry mass of reformers, leaguers, and cheap-bread men, to clap their wings like a flight of crows over the bleeding majesty of Rome. Then the chance sound of a trumpet, or the tread of a cohort along the distant rampart, would make him turn back his glance, and think of the twenty thousand first-rate soldiers whom a wave of his finger would move across the Channel, send through Gaul, sacking Lutetia, darting through the defiles of the Alps, and bringing him in triumph through the Janiculum, up to the temple of the Capitoline Jove. Glorious dreams, and gloriously realised! How vexatious is it that we cannot see the past, that we cannot fly back from the bustle of this blacksmith world, from the jargon of public life, and the tameness of private toil; into those majestic ages, when the world was as magnificent as a theatre; when nations were swallowed up in the shifting of a scene; when all were fifth acts, and when every catastrophe broke down an empire! But, what sounds are these? The steamer had shot along during my reverie, and was now passing a long line of low-built strong vessels, moored in the centre of the river. I looked round, and here was more than a dream of the past; here was the past itself--here was man in his primitive state, as he had issued from the forest, before a profane axe had cropped its brushwood. Here I saw perhaps five hundred of my fellow-beings, no more indebted to the frippery of civilisation than the court of Caractacus.--Bold figures, daring brows, Herculean shapes, naked to the waist, and with skins of the deepest bronze. Cast in metal, and fixed in a gallery, they would have made an incomparable rank and file of gladiatorial statues.