Thus have we briefly sketched the arts of that people who, at all periods, and in every form, have built out of ruins. A band of robbers found on the banks of the Tiber a city abandoned by its builders, and which they chose to inhabit. But outcasts as they were, they brought few women with them, and these they took by violence from the peaceful Etruscans. No attractive house, nor ample temple, was erected by the Romans for five hundred years, so barbarous was the genius of the people. Corinth and Syracuse, two most magnificent cities, left no impression on their conquerors; their drinking vessels were of gold, while their temples and deities were of uncouth stone, or brittle clay. Nero built an immense palace, gilded in the most costly manner throughout. But the masters of the world, trembling to enter it, commanded its destruction, and removed the works of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Scopas and Lysippus, of Apelles and Zeuxis, and, in a fearful conflagration, poured forth torrents of precious metals from its ceilings, its arches, and its architraves, in order to construct out of its scathed kitchens and stables a bath and amphitheatre for the Roman people. They did less in their city than in their colonies, for the ultimate welfare of humanity. The most majestic and solid specimen of engineering was the bridge with which they spanned the Danube; and the grandest of their works was the wall they erected against the Caledonians. About B.C. 200, the Chinese completed their immense wall, to fence themselves in; and the Romans would fain ward the northern barbarians off. But Providence, leaving the effete East to its chosen isolation, with irresistible movement sweeps outward on the broad current of progressive civilization, and lifts the curtain of a new act in the still more glorious West. CHAPTER III. SCIENCE. We are told by Livy that, soon after his disappearance from among men, the spirit of Romulus revisited the distinguished senator, Proculus Julius, and addressed him as follows: "Go, tell my countrymen it is the decree of heaven, that the city I have founded shall become the mistress of the world. Let her cultivate assiduously the military art. Then let her be assured, and transmit the assurance from age to age, that no mortal power can resist the arms of Rome." Strict and persevering obedience to this counsel eventually caused that colossal power to extend itself from Siberia to the Great Desert, and from the Ganges to the Atlantic. But it would be in vain to look to such a people, actuated by martial ambition only, for the general and successful cultivation of science. Regal, republican, and imperial Rome, was undoubtedly a perfect model of a predatory state, but the last to excel in refined and erudite thought.