“The glories of the Forum are now fled forever,” says Mr. Eustace. Its temples are fallen; its sanctuaries are crumbled into dust; its colonnades encumber pavements, now buried under their remains. The walls of the rostra, stripped of their ornaments, and doomed to eternal silence; a few shattered porticos, and here and there an insulated column standing in the midst of broken shafts, vast fragments of marble capitals and cornices heaped together in masses, remind the traveller that the field which he now traverses was once the Roman forum[154]. It is reduced, indeed, not to the pasture-ground for cattle, which Virgil has described, but to the market-place for pigs, sheep, and oxen; being now the Smithfield of Rome. The hills, the rivers, the roads and bridges, in this mother of cities, mostly go by their ancient Latin names, slightly altered in Italian, but the Forum has not even retained its name; it is now called Campo Vaccino, or the Field of Cows! This scene[155], though now so desolate and degraded, was once the great centre of all the business, power, and splendour of Rome. Here, as long as the Romans were a free people, all the affairs of the state were debated in the most public manner; and from the rostra, elevated in the midst of the square, and with their eyes fixed on the capitol, which immediately faced them, and which was suited to fill their minds with patriotism, whilst the Tarpeian rock reminded them of the fate reserved for treason and corruption, the noblest of orators “wielded at will” the fierce democracy, or filled the souls of gathered thousands with one object, one wish, one passion—the freedom and glory of the Roman race;—a freedom which would have been more enduring had the glory been less. “Yes; in yon field below, A thousand years of silenced factions sleep— The Forum, where the immortal accents glow, And still the eloquent air breathes, burns, of Cicero! “The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood. Here a proud people’s passions were exhaled, From the first hour of empire in the bud, To that when further worlds to conquer fail’d; But long before had Freedom’s face been veil’d, And Anarchy assumed her attributes; Till every lawless soldier who assail’d Trod on the trembling senate’s slavish mutes, Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.”