Never had that proud city suffered from her barbarian conquerors, in the decline of the Roman empire,—from Alaric, from Genseric, or from Odoacer,—the same merciless treatment as she underwent from the rage of the imperial troops;—the subjects, or the soldiers of a Catholic king! Rapacity, lust, and impiety, were exhausted by these men. Roman ladies of the noblest extraction were submitted to the basest and vilest prostitution. The sacred ornaments of the sacerdotal, and even of the pontifical dignity, were converted to purposes of ridicule and buffoonery. Priests, nay even bishops and cardinals, were degraded to the brutal passions of the soldiery; and after having suffered every ignominy of blows, mutilation, and personal contumely, were massacred in pastime. Exorbitant ransoms were exacted repeatedly from the same persons; and when they had no longer wherewithal to purchase life, they were butchered without mercy. Nuns, virgins, matrons, were publicly devoted to the infamous appetites of the soldiers; who first violated, and then stabbed, the victims of their pleasures. The streets were strewed with the dead; and it is said that eight thousand young women, of all ranks and conditions, were found to be pregnant within five months from the sack of the unfortunate city. Three years after the sack by Bourbon, that is in 1530, an inundation of the Tiber ruined a multitude of edifices both public and private, and was almost equally calamitous with the sack of Rome. Simond, writing from Rome in January 1818, says: “The Tiber has been very high, and the lower parts of the town under water; yet this is nothing compared with the inundations recorded on two pillars at the port of Ripetta, a sort of landing-place. The mark on one of them is full eighteen feet above the level of the adjoining streets; and, considering the rapidity of the stream, a great part of the city must then have been in imminent danger of being swept away.” In 1819 the Pantheon was flooded; but this is not an uncommon event, as it stands near the river, and the drain, which should carry off the rain-water that falls through the aperture in the top, communicates with the stream. The inundations of the Tiber, indeed, are one of the causes, which combined to destroy so many of the monuments of Rome during the middle ages. There is one recorded in 1345, among the afflictions of the times, when only the summits of the hills were above the water, and the lower grounds were converted into a lake for the space of eight days. Several floods are mentioned by the ancient writers; and Tacitus speaks of a project which was debated in the senate, A. D. 15, for diverting some of the streams running into the Tiber, but which was not carried into execution in consequence of the petitions of various towns, who sent deputies to oppose it; partly on the ground of their local interests being affected, and partly from a feeling of superstition, which emboldened them to urge that “Nature had