put his slender candle. We saw the skeleton as it had fallen from the flesh in decay, untouched, perhaps, since the time of Christ. We crossed through several cross-passages, and came to a small chamber, excavated simply in the earth, with an earthern altar, and an antique marble cross above. This was the scene of the forbidden worship of the early Christians, and before this very cross, which was, perhaps, then newly selected as the emblem of their faith, met the few dismayed followers of Christ, hidden from their persecutors, while they breathed their forbidden prayers to their lately crucified Master. We reascended to the light of day by the rough stone steps, worn deep by the feet of those who, for ages, for so many different reasons, have passed up and down; and, taking leave of our capuchin conductor, drove on to the next object upon the road--the _tomb of Cecilia Metella_. It stands upon a slight elevation, in the Appian Way, a "stern round tower," with the ivy dropping over its turrets and waving from the embrasures, looking more like a castle than a tomb. Here was buried "the wealthiest Roman's wife," or, according to Corinne, his unmarried daughter. It was turned into a fortress by the marauding nobles of the thirteenth century, who sallied from this and the tomb of Adrian, plundering the ill-defended subjects of Pope Innocent IV. till they were taken and hanged from the walls by Brancaleone, the Roman senator. It is built with prodigious strength. We stooped in passing under the low archway, and emerged into the round chamber within, a lofty room, open to the sky, in the circular wall of which there is a niche for a single body. Nothing could exceed the delicacy and fancy with which Childe Harold muses on this spot. The lofty turrets command a wide view of the Campagna, the long aqueducts stretching past at a short distance, and forming a chain of noble arches from Rome to the mountains of Albano. Cole's picture of the Roman Campagna, as seen from one of these elevations, is, I think, one of the finest landscapes ever painted. Just below the tomb of Metella, in a flat valley, lie the extensive ruins of what is called the "circus of Caracalla" by some, and the "circus of Romulus" by others--a scarcely distinguishable heap of walls and marble, half buried in the earth and moss; and not far off stands a beautiful ruin of a small temple dedicated (as some say) to _Ridicule_. One smiles to look at it. If the embodying of that which is powerful, however, should make a deity, the dedication of a temple to _ridicule_ is far from amiss. In our age particularly, one would think, the lamp should be relit, and the reviewers should repair the temple. Poor Keats sleeps in his grave scarce a mile from the spot, a human victim sacrificed, not long ago, upon its highest altar.