“On entering the walls,” says Mr. Forsyth, “I felt the religion of the place. I stood as on sacred ground. I stood amazed at the long obscurity of its mighty ruins. They can be descried with a glass from Salerno; the high road of Calabria commands a distant view; the city of Capaccio looks down upon them, and a few wretches have always lived on the spot; yet they remain unnoticed by the best Neapolitan antiquaries.” The FIRST temple[103] that presents itself, to the traveller from Naples, is the smallest. It consists of six pillars at each end, and thirteen on each side. The cella occupied more than one-third of the length, and had a portico of two rows of columns, the shafts and capitals of which, now overgrown with grass and weeds, encumber the pavement, and almost fill the area of the temple:— ————The serpent sleeps, and the she-wolf Suckles her young. The columns of this temple are thick in proportion to their elevation, and much closer to each other than they are generally found to be in Greek temples; “and this,” says Mr. Forsyth, “crowds them advantageously on the eye, enlarges our idea of the space, and gives a grand and heroic air to a monument of very moderate dimensions.” In the open space[104] between the first and second temples, were two other large buildings, built of the same sort of stone, and nearly of the same size. Their substructions still remain, encumbered with fragments of the columns of the entablatures; and so overgrown with brambles, nettles, and weeds, as scarcely to admit a near inspection. The SECOND[105], or the Temple of NEPTUNE, is not the largest, but by far the most massy and imposing of the three: it has six columns in front and fourteen in length; the angular column to the west, with its capital, has been struck and partially shivered by lightning. It once threatened to fall and ruin the symmetry of one of the most perfect monuments now in existence, but it has been secured by iron cramps. An inner peristyle of much smaller columns rises in the cella, in two stories, with only an architrave, which has neither frieze nor cornice between the columns, which thus almost seem standing, the one on the capital of the other—a defect in architecture, which is, however, justified by Vitruvius and the example of the Parthenon. The light pillars of this interior peristyle, of which some have fallen, rise a few feet above the exterior cornice and the massy columns of the temple. Whether you gaze at this wonderful edifice from without or from within, as you stand on the floor of the cella, which is much encumbered with heaps of fallen stones and rubbish, the effect is awfully grand. The utter solitude, and the silence, never broken save by the flight and screams of the crows and birds of prey, which, your approach may scare from the cornices and architraves, where they roost in great numbers, add to the solemn impression, produced by those firm-set and eternal-looking columns.