of the list will best illustrate my text--that of public baths--which came most directly home to me, as I was devoted to swimming in those days, and so had great sympathy with the poor citizen of Imperial Rome who desired to have baths in the best form and without payment. I do not know that there is any trustworthy evidence as to the public baths of Rome before Imperial times, but we can estimate pretty accurately how the case stood for the poor Roman in the first and second centuries A.D. The best preserved of these are the Baths of Caracalla, in which sixteen hundred bathers could be accommodated at once. The enclosed area was 360 yards square, or considerably larger than Lincoln’s Inn Fields; but this included a course for foot-races, in which, I suppose, the younger bathers contended when fresh from the delights of hot and cold baths, while their elders looked on from the porticoes adjoining. The bathing establishment proper, however, was 240 yards in length, by 124 yards in width, in which the divisions of the “tepidaria,” “calidaria,” and “frigidaria,” are still confidently pointed out in Baedeker, and attested by guides if you like to hire them. But the part which interested me most, apart from the huge masses of wall still standing, was the depression in the floor, which is said to have been the swimming-bath, and which is at least twice as large as those of the Holborn and Lambeth baths, the two largest in London in my time, put together. The remains of the walls are just astounding, eight feet and ten feet thick, and (I should say) in several places fifty feet high; the thin Roman bricks, and the mortar in which they are built, as hard as they were in the second century. I wish I could feel any confidence that any of our London brickwork would show as well even a century hence. When the floors were all covered with mosaic pavement, of which small pieces now carefully preserved still remain, and the brickwork of the walls was faced with marble, and the statues which have been found here and removed to museums, still stood round the central fountain and in the courts, my imagination quite fails to picture what the baths must have looked like. But the Baths of Caracalla, though best preserved, are not by any means the largest. Those of Diocletian, on the Quirinal and partly facing the railway station, were almost twice as big, for the circumference of the bath buildings was about 2000 yards, or half as large again as the Baths of Caracalla, while they would accommodate (it is said) three thousand bathers at once. It is even more impossible, however, to reconstruct these baths in one’s fancy than those of Caracalla, for the church of St. Bernardo occupies one domed corner of the area, and a prison another corner; while a convent, with the Church of St. Maria degli Angeli attached--built by Michael Angelo by order of Pius IV.--stands over what was the “tepidarium.” There is still,