For this desponding view of passing events, _Onuphrio_ finds consolation in the evidences of revealed religion. In the origin, progress, elevation, decline, and fall of the empires of antiquity, he sees proofs that they were intended for a definite end in the scheme of human redemption; and he finds prophecies which have been amply verified. He regards the foundation or the ruin of a kingdom, which appears in civil history so great an event, as comparatively of small moment in the history of man and in his religious institutions. He considers the establishment of the worship of one God amongst a despised and contemned people, as the most important circumstance in the history of the early world. He regards the Christian dispensation as naturally arising out of the Jewish, and the doctrines of the Pagan nations all preparatory to the triumph and final establishment of a creed fitted for the most enlightened state of the human mind, and equally adapted to every climate and every people. We cannot but regard these passages with great interest, as indicating the train of thought which must have occupied the mind of their author, and as proving that, in his latter days, he not only studied the doctrines of Christianity, but derived the greatest consolation from its tenets. After some farther conversation, _Onuphrio_ and _Ambrosio_ leave their friend the author to pursue his meditations amidst the solitude of the ruins. Seated in the moonshine on one of the steps leading to the seats supposed to have been occupied by the patricians in the Colosæum at the time of the public games, the train of ideas in which he had before indulged continued to flow with a vividness and force increased by the stillness and solitude of the scene, and by the full moon, which, he observes, has always a peculiar effect on these moods of feeling in his mind, giving to them a wildness and a kind of indefinite sensation, such as he supposes belong at all times to the true poetical temperament.