among the poorest productions of Livy's genius? A very simple sum in arithmetic would satisfy an actuary that we must have lost the most valuable emanations of the Paduan's great mind. Given a salvage of five-and-thirty out of a hundred and forty-two, and yet the whole of this wreck so marvellous in beauty! surely that which is gone for ever must have included much that is equal, probably something far superior to what time has spared. There is a curious fact recorded by Pliny the younger, which speaks for itself. A Spaniard of Cadiz had, only some five months before the date of our story, journeyed from the ends of the earth to Rome merely to obtain a sight of Livy. There were imperial shows in the forum and hippodrome and circus at the time; there were races on foot, and on horseback, and in chariots; fights there were of all kinds--men against wild animals, men against each other; with the sword, with the deadly cestus; wrestling matches, and the dreadful battles of gladiators, five hundred a side; in short, all the glitter and the glories and the horrors of the old classic arena in its culminating days. There was also a strange new Greek fence, since inherited by Naples, and preserved all through the middle ages down to this hour, with the straight, pliant, three-edged rapier, to witness which even ladies thronged with interest and partisanship. But the Spaniard from Gades (Cervantes might surely have had such an ancestor) asked only to be shown Titus Livius. Which in yonder group is Livy? The wayfarer cared for nothing else that Roman civilization or Roman vanity could show him. The great writer was pointed out, and then the traveller, having satisfied the motive which had brought him to Rome, went back to Ostia, where his lugger, if I may so call it, lay, (I picture it a kind of "wing-and-wing" rigged vessel;) and, refusing to profane his eyes with any meaner spectacle, set sail again for Spain, where his youth had been illumined with the visions presented to a sympathetic imagination by the most charming of classical historians. The Spaniards from an immemorial age are deemed to have been heroes and appreciators of heroes; and no doubt this literary pilgrim, once more at home, recurred many a time, long pondering, to the glorious deeds of the _Fabia Gens_. How many other similar examples Livy may have recorded for him we moderns cannot say. Before his gaze arose the finished column from the fragments whereof we have gathered up some scattered bricks and marbles. Niebuhr had to deal with a ruin, and he who ought to have guessed at and reconstructed the plan of it, has contented himself with trying to demolish its form.