Here the orators of the people brought their accusations against public men, or pronounced eulogies on such as had died for their country; and here, also, were exhibited the bleeding heads or lifeless bodies of traitors, or, as it but too often happened, of men unjustly deemed so by an overbearing faction. The Forum was the court of justice, and in homely days of the early republic, civil and criminal causes were tried and decided by simple laws in the open air, or in very plain sheds built in this square. The humble schools for the republican children (for even these old Romans had places of public instruction for the poor people) stood round the Forum, which seems to have been intermixed with shops, shambles, stalls, lowly temples, and altars. No object within the walls of Rome, according to Dr. Burton, is so melancholy as the Forum. “We may lament,” says he, “the ruin of a temple or a palace, but our interest in the remaining fragments is frequently diminished by our either not knowing with certainty to what building they belonged, or because history has not stamped them with any peculiar recollections. But standing upon the hill of the Capitol, and looking down upon the Forum, we contemplate a scene with which we fancy ourselves familiar, and we seem suddenly to have quitted the habitations of living men. Not only is its former grandeur utterly annihilated, but the ground has not been applied to any other purpose. When we descend into it, we find that many of the ancient buildings are buried under irregular heaps of soil. A warm imagination might fancy that some spell hung over the spot, forbidding it to be profaned by the ordinary occupations of inhabited cities. What Virgil says of its appearance before the Trojan settlers arrived, is singularly true at the present moment: “There oxen strolled where palaces are raised, And bellowing herds in the proud Forum grazed[156].”