But what one sees in Rome can only give the faintest idea of what it was when mistress of the world. In place of being confined to the comparatively circumscribed limits of the walls, a space which at present it only partially covers, the city, besides being composed of high, many–storied houses, like those in the Old Town of Edinburgh, extended for miles over the Campagna, and that perhaps very densely. Instead of a population now of scarcely a quarter of a million, the population then is thought to have greatly exceeded that of London at the present day. Indeed, some have not hesitated to state it at as high a figure as 14,000,000, while others, more moderate in their calculations, have placed it at from 4,000,000 to 6,000,000. But whatever it may have been (for this is a _questio vexata_), it was many times what it has now become. Then consider the magnificent multiplicity of its buildings and decorations. For, besides 700 temples[37] and other structures of whose number no record perhaps exists, there were in ancient Rome at one time, 31 theatres, 11 amphitheatres (and we have seen the scale upon which these erections were constructed), 48 obelisks, 66 ivory statues, 82 equestrian statues, 3785 bronze statues, 1352 fountains, 2091 prisons, 9025 baths, 17,097 palaces. Then keep in view that this was all during a period when classic taste prevailed, and everything, as the remains now left testify, was in the utmost perfection of art, and sometimes of the most wonderful magnificence. Keep also in view that thousands of Roman citizens were then of immense opulence, one evidence of which was that they were possessed of crowds of slaves, some of them having as many as 10,000 or even 20,000; and think what pomp and style must have been kept up in the 17,000 palaces of Rome, surging out upon its 360 spacious streets and its countless minor _vias_, and one approaches to an idea of the superb grandeur of the great city; in the presence of which it does make us feel small to think, that while we lavish millions on war, we cannot so much as, at the hundredth part of the cost of one of our little wars, build and complete a single temple in the perfection of the ancients, seeing we have the National Monument on the Calton Hill, so bravely begun, in a condition calculated merely to expose the indifference to high art with which the British nation is afflicted. But we cannot be sorry for the fall of Rome, and only should take warning from it, because its power was built up on military force, and its riches were got, not by the successful prosecution of peaceful pursuits, but by the conquest and plunder and the subjection of other nations.