It was not to be expected that _Onuphrio_, whose views are represented as verging upon scepticism, should have tacitly coincided in these opinions of _Ambrosio_. He admits, indeed, that some little of the perfect state in which these ruins exist may have been owing to the causes just described; but these causes, he maintains, have only lately begun to operate, and the mischief was done before Christianity was established at Rome. "Feeling differently on these subjects," says he, "I admire this venerable ruin rather as the record of the destruction of the power of the greatest people that ever existed, than as a proof of the triumph of Christianity; and I am carried forward, in melancholy anticipation, to the period when even the magnificent dome of St. Peter's will be in a similar state to that in which the Colosæum now is, and when its ruins may be preserved by the sanctifying influence of some new and unknown faith; when perhaps the statue of Jupiter, which at present receives the kiss of the devotee, as the image of St. Peter, may be employed for another holy use, as the personification of a future saint or divinity; and when the monuments of the Papal magnificence shall be mixed with the same dust as that which now covers the tombs of the Cæsars. "Such, I am sorry to say, is the general history of all the works and institutions belonging to humanity. They rise, flourish, and then decay and fall; and the period of their decline is generally proportional to that of their elevation. In ancient Thebes or Memphis, the peculiar genius of the people has left us monuments from which we can judge of their arts, though we cannot understand the nature of their superstitions. Of Babylon and of Troy, the remains are almost extinct; and what we know of those famous cities is almost entirely derived from literary records. Ancient Greece and Rome we view in the few remains of their monuments; and the time will arrive when modern Rome shall be what ancient Rome now is; and ancient Rome and Athens will be what Tyre or Carthage now are, known only by coloured dust in the desert, or coloured sand, containing the fragments of bricks, or glass, washed up by the wave of a stormy sea."