“The baths of Caracalla, stripped of all their verdure and shrubs, and deprived alike of the tufted foliage amid which Shelley wrote, and of the flowery carpet which so greatly enhanced their lonely solemnity, are now a series of bare featureless walls standing in a gravelly waste, and possess no more attraction than the ruins of a London warehouse. The Coliseum, no longer ‘a garlanded ring,’ is bereaved of everything which made it so lovely and so picturesque; while botanists must for ever deplore the incomparable and strangely unique ‘Flora of the Coliseum,’ which Signor Rosa has caused to be carefully annihilated; even the roots of the shrubs having been extracted by the firemen, though, in pulling them out, more of the building has come down than five hundred years of time would have injured. In the Basilica of Constantine, the whole of the beautiful covering of shrubs with which nature had protected the vast arches, has been removed, and the rain soaking into the unprotected upper surface, will soon bring them down. Nor has the work of the destroyer been confined to the Pagan antiquities, the early Christian porches of S. Prassede and S. Pudenziana, with their valuable terra-cotta ornaments, have been so smeared with paint and yellow-wash as to be irrecognisable; many smaller but precious Christian antiquities, such as the lion of the Santi Apostoli, have disappeared altogether. And in return for these destructions and abductions Rome has been given—what? Quantities of hideous false rock-work painted brown in all the public gardens; a Swiss cottage and a clock which goes by water forced in amidst the statues and sarcophagi of the Pincio; and the having the passages of the Capitol painted all over with the most flaring scarlet and blue, so as utterly to destroy the repose and splendour of its ancient statues.” We visited a very old house in the Ghetto, where at the time services were held by a company of Jewish converts. Rude, uncomfortable and mean, the place looked to any one accustomed to modern churches; yet that dreary apartment, up a flight of stairs, was typical of places for Christian worship in the imperial city of the second century. Few fashionable people know the existence of the room I mention, and attendants shyly ascend the dirty steps, wishing to be unobserved; just so, no doubt, it was with some of the companies in the second century who in Rome “sang praises to Jesus as to God.” In the reigns of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, little was known about the Gospel by the higher ranks. Emperors, consuls, magistrates, marched along the streets in haughty indifference, or with contemptuous hate towards the new superstition.