In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine, Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia; above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of such remains in Roman cities elsewhere. THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1871