"The Roman Emperor Hadrian," philosophizes Hillard, "after many years of care and conquest, with a marked taste for architecture, and the resources of the whole civilized world at his command, resolved to surround his declining life with reproductions of all the striking objects which he had seen in the course of his world-wide wanderings. He selected for the site of this gigantic enterprise a spot singularly favorable to his objects. It was a range of gently undulating hills, of about three miles in extent, with a natural boundary, formed in part by a winding valley, and partly by walls of rock. On the east, it was overlooked by the wooded heights of the Sabine Mountains; and, on the west, it commanded a view of the Campagna and the Eternal City, whose temples and obelisks, relieved against the golden sky of sunset, must have soothed the mind of its imperial master with thoughts of duties performed and of repose, earned by toil. The natural inequalities and undulations of the site, which furnished heights, plains, valleys, and glens, aided and lightened the tasks of the architect and the landscape gardener. The emperor is said to have inclosed a space of eight or ten miles in circuit, so that, if the statement were true, the villa and its appurtenances occupied an area greater than that of Pompeii. Here he set to work with armies of laborers and mountains of gold, and, in an incredibly short space of time, the ground was covered with an amazing number of costly and extensive structures, which had risen like exhalations from the soil. Besides the imperial palace, there was a library, an academy, a lyceum, numerous temples, one or more theatres, a covered walk or portico, and spacious barracks for the accommodation of the Praetorian guards. Besides these, a glen through which a stream flowed was made into a miniature likeness of the vale of Tempe; a flowery plain was called by the name of the Elysian Fields; and an immense cavern, filled with sunless waters, recalled the gloom of Tartarus.... The ruins, at the present time, seen hastily and without the interpretation of an intelligent guide, are a confused mass of decay, revealing very little of their former destination or structure.... A considerable portion of the space formerly occupied by the villa is now under cultivation, and nature, aided by a soft sky and a productive soil, has been busy in healing the gaping wounds of time, and covering unsightly ruin with a mantle of bloom and beauty.... The whole scene is now a broad page on which is stamped an impressive lesson of the vanity of human wishes. The great emperor, even while his last workmen were gathering up their tools to depart, was attacked by a mortal disease; and, seventy years after his death, Caracalla began the work of spoliation by carrying off its most costly marbles to decorate the baths whose ruins are in turn monuments to his name in Rome. A recent French traveler states that a species of syringa, which Hadrian