be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret, as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world, Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum. We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we wish--we must confess the weakness--to see independent Hernicans wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word certainly means something quite different from what it commonly means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more important--though about the comparative importance some might raise a doubt--than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them by the proper road; we must get into what once was the _arx_, what is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino, ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance, and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the _arx_, as a mighty sub-structure. The walls of the _arx_ show the same two dates as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the "Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of