I saw an old man come riding by. Says I, “Old man, your horse will die”; Says he, “If he dies I’ll tan his skin, And if he lives I’ll ride him agin.” It fits the Irish temper, North and South, pleasant enough to travel amongst, but bad, I should think, to live with. “Panem et Circenses”, Rome, 21 st April 1895. I have been asking myself at least a dozen times a day during the last fortnight, why Rome should be (to me, at any rate) the city of surprises, far more than Athens or Constantine, for instance, or any other city or scene of world-wide interest in Europe or America. Jerusalem and the Nile cities I have never seen (and fear I never shall now). Surely, to what I take to be the majority of your readers, who have gone through, as I have, the orthodox educational mill--public school and college--precisely the contrary should be true. We spent no small part of from six to ten years of the most impressionable time of our lives in studying the story of the Mistress of the Old World, from Romulus and Remus to the Anto-nines. Even the idlest and most careless of us could scarcely have passed his “greats” without knowing his geography well enough to point out on the map the position of each of the seven hills, the Forum, the Janiculum, the Appian Way, the Arch of Titus, the Colosseum, etc., and must have formed some kind of notion in his own mind of what each of them looked like. At any rate, I had no excuse for not knowing my ancient Rome better than I knew any modern city, both as to its geography and the politics, beliefs, and habits of its citizens; for I was for two years in the pupil-room of a teacher (Bishop Cotton) who spared no pains, not only on the texts of Livy, Horace, Sallust, and Juvenal, and the geography, but in making the Rome of the last years of the Republic and the first Caesars live again for us. For instance, he would collect for us all the best engravings then to be had (it was before the days of photographs) of Rome, and show us what remained of the old buildings and monuments, and where the Papal city had encroached and superseded them; and again, would take infinite pains to explain the changes in the ordinary life of the Roman citizen, which had been creeping on since the end of the third Punic war, when her last formidable rival went down, and the struggle between patrician and plebeian had time and opportunity to develop and work itself out, till it ended in the Augustan age, when the will of the Cæsar remained the sole ultimate law, in Rome, and over the whole Empire. Of course the explanation of the phrase “Panem et circenses,” and the growth of the system, in the shape of public feastings, shows, baths, and other entertainments, with which each successful Tribune or General, as he came to the front, and the Cæsars after them, tried to bribe and sway the mob of the Forum, formed no small part of this instruction. One item