knows what it was, I hope you will imagine to be something of the utmost magnificence. From what still exists, it seems to have been a temple, partly subterraneous, at the end of a valley in some degree artificial, and with constructions on each side of it, and spacious and highly ornamented subterraneous chambers. You will imagine apartments for the emperor, his attendants, and his guards; but there is another thing which you will not imagine, which is a subterraneous gallery, said to be for exercise on horseback, but which are perhaps the _inferi_ mentioned by Spartian; they form a square, of which the circuit exceeds half a mile. Beyond all these, are various foundations, and the remains of aqueducts, and further still some other considerable remains, which perhaps did not belong to this villa. Including these, the whole extent is about two miles in a straight line. All the existing buildings are of rubble, with brick or reticulated facings; and this is I believe, the last instance of any considerable quantity of reticulated work. The baths of Caracalla have it not. We may conclude from Vitruvius that the practice began in the age of Augustus, and that it must therefore have lasted one hundred and eighty years. Even the bricks here have been taken away for modern use, at the evident risk of occasioning the fall of the edifice to which they belonged. Much as has been discovered among these ruins, it does not appear that any settled plan was ever pursued in the excavations; and perhaps much may yet remain to be discovered in point of valuable objects, and certainly much to determine the disposition of the buildings, of which no good plan, even as to the remains above-ground, has ever been published. Thus much however is certain, that no one symmetrical design prevailed throughout the whole. The buildings were disposed either as the convenience of situation, or the shape of the ground suggested. It has been said, and is repeated by every writer on the subject, that Hadrian had here collected imitations of all the buildings which he had seen in different parts of his empire; but of all the fragments which remain, there is not one, of which the plan does not shew it to have been entirely Roman. There is not a single morsel, that could by any possibility have belonged to an ancient edifice of Greece or Egypt; not one to which parallel remains may not be found in the neighbourhood of Rome, where no suspicion was ever entertained of such an imitation. We may imagine the representation was not very exact, when we find a little flat valley between sandy slopes of 40 or 50 feet high, and watered by a brook of the smallest size, dignified by the name of the magnificent mountain pass, through which the Peneus pours its waters to the sea. It is _possible_ that all these imitations were of solid stone or marble, and have tempted spoliation by the value of the material, but then we should expect to find at Rome vestiges of the