The old exclamation about Augustus finding Rome of brick and leaving it of marble, deceives many. Ancient Rome was by no means a marble city, although the quarries of Massa and Carrara are not far distant. The staple-building materials of the Imperial City, even in its palmiest days, were brick and travertine. The brick, however, was very different from the porous cakes of crudely burnt clay of which the modern metropolis of the world is built. I have examined on the spot a great many specimens, and found them all to be of remarkably compact structure, somewhere between the material of modern terra-cotta and that of common flower-pots, and similarly intermediate in color. The Roman builders appear to have had no standard size; the bricks vary even in the same building—the Coliseum for example; all that I have seen are much thinner than our bricks—we should call them tiles. But the most characteristic material is the travertine. The walls of the Coliseum are made up of a mixture of this and the tiles above-mentioned. The same is the case with most of the other very massive ruins, as the baths, etc. Many of the temples with columns and facing of marble have inner walls built of this mixture, while others are entirely of travertine. I was greatly surprised at the wondrous imperishability of this remarkable material. In buildings of which the smooth crystalline marble had lost all its sharpness and original surface, this dirty, yellow, spongy-looking limestone remained without the slightest indication of weathering. A most remarkable instance of this is afforded by the temple of Neptune at Paestum, in Calabria. This is the most perfect ruin of a pure classic temple that now remains in existence, and in my opinion is the finest. I prefer it even to the Parthenon. We have a little sample of it in London. The Doric columns at the entrance of the Euston station are copies of those of its peristyle. The originals are of travertine, the blocks forming them are laid upon each other without mortar or cement, and so truly flattened that in walking round the building and carefully prying, I could find no crevice into which a slip of ordinary writing paper, or the blade of a pen-knife could be inserted. Yet this temple was an antiquarian monument in the days of the Roman emperors. The rough natural surface of the stone is exposed, and at first sight appears as though weathered, but this appearance is simply due to its natural sponge-like structure. It appears to have been coated with some sort of stucco or smoothing film, which, either by forming a thin layer, or possibly by only filling up the pores of the travertine, gave a smooth surface upon which the coloring was applied. This is now only indistinctly visible here and there, and if I remember rightly, some have disputed its existence.