Corinne and Nevil recommenced their excursions, by visiting the most remarkable among the numerous churches of Rome. They are all adorned by magnificent antiquities; but these festal ornaments, torn from pagan temples, have here a strange, wild effect. Granite and porphyry pillars are so plentiful, that they are lavished as if almost valueless. At St. John Lateran, famed for the councils that have been held in it, so great is the quantity of marble columns, that many of them are covered with cement, to form pilasters; thus indifferent has this profusion of riches rendered its possessors. Some of these pillars belonged to the Tomb of Adrian, others to the Capitol; some still bear the forms of the geese which preserved the Romans; others have Gothic and even Arabesque embellishments. The urn of Agrippa contains the ashes of a pope. The dead of one generation give place to the dead of another, and tombs here as often change their occupants as the abodes of the living. Near St. John Lateran are the holy stairs, brought, it is said, from Jerusalem, and which no one ascends but on his knees; as Claudius, and even Cæsar, mounted those which led to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Beside St. John's is the front where Constantine is supposed to have been baptized. In the centre of this ground is an obelisk, perhaps the most ancient work of art in the world--contemporary with the Trojan war--so respected, even by the barbarous Cambyses, that he put a stop to the conflagration of a city in its honor; and, for its sake, a king pledged the life of his only son. The Romans brought it from the heart of Egypt by miracle. They turned the Nile from his course that it might be found, and carried to the sea. This obelisk is still covered with hieroglyphics, which have kept their secret for centuries, and defy the sages of to-day to decipher signs that might reveal the annals of India and of Egypt--the antiquities of antiquity! The wondrous charm of Rome consists not only in the real beauty of her monuments, but in the interest they excite; the material for thinking they suggest; the speculations which grow, every day, the stronger from each new study.