When Nero perished by the justest doom Which ever the destroyer yet destroyed, Amidst the roar of liberated Rome, Of nations freed and the world overjoyed, Some hands unseen strewed flowers upon his tomb,-- Perhaps the weakness of a heart not void Of feeling for some kindness done, when power Had left the wretch an uncorrupted hour. The stone slab on which is inscribed the simple epitaph of Ecloge is in the Capitoline Museum. Perhaps it was by her own request, in tender recollections of earlier days and also of her part in the preparations of his body for its cremation, that she was buried on the scene of her infamous nurseling’s death. There is an old tradition that the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo was founded by Pope Pascal II in the early part of the eleventh century on the site of the tombs of the Domitii and the burial place of Nero, because he would thus free the place from the demons that were supposed to haunt it. In the sixteenth century it was the Augustinian Convent (now suppressed) adjoining this church that was the lodging place of the monk Martin Luther on his visit to Rome. On his arrival he prostrated himself on the earth and exclaimed in the language of an old pilgrim hymn: “I salute thee, O holy Rome, sacred with the blood of the martyrs.” Then he celebrated mass in the church. Before he departed from Rome,--having very different feelings from those with which he had entered it, and soon to become a great reformer,--he celebrated mass in this church again. It contains many grand old tombs and fine works of art. In the center of the square, between four spouting lions, rises the Egyptian obelisk, which the Emperor Augustus erected in B. C. 10, in the ancient Circus Maximus to commemorate the subjugation of Egypt. Its hieroglyphic inscription is said to mention the names of Meneptah and Rameses III (1326 and 1273 B. C.). Hawthorne in his “Marble Faun,” that book which has become a very classic for its reproduction of modern Roman life and spirit, says: All Roman works and ruins, whether of the empire, the far-off Republic or the still more distant Kings, assume a transient, visionary and impalpable character when we think that this indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections which Moses and the Israelites bore from Egypt into the desert. Perchance on beholding the cloudy pillar and the fiery column they whispered awe-stricken to one another: “In its shape it is like that old obelisk which we and our fathers have so often seen on the borders of the Nile.”