indeed, much room for scepticism with respect to the propriety of the names that have been applied to many of them. The Temple of Vesta, for example, at no great distance from the Palatine Hill, must be referred to this doubtful order. Its situation on the banks of the river seems to accord well enough with Horace's "monumenta Vestæ*"; and its position will agree with the "ventum erat ad Vestæ" of the ninth satire, where it is represented as lying beyond the Tiber, in the way from the Via Sacra to the gardens of Cæsar. Yet, observes Forsyth, "if you fix Vesta in this round temple on the Tiber, others will contend there for Hercules, or Portumnus, or Volupia. If, again, you assign the three magnificent columns in the Forum to Jupiter Stator, others will force them into a senate-house, or a portico, or a comitium, or a bridge. All round the Palatine, the Forum, the Velabrum, and the Sacred Way, is the favourite field of antiquarian polemics. On this field may fight most learnedly at an easy rate: every inch of it has been disputed; every opinion may gain some plausibility, and whichever you adopt will find proofs ready marshalled in its defence:" Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void, O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light, And you say, "here was, or is," where all is doubly night?-BYRON. * It is objected, however, with some appearance of reason, that when Horace alludes to a flood of the Tiber, reaching even to the temple of Vesta, as a memorable occurrence, he can hardly mean this temple, which is on the very banks of the river. 225 WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. Reliquias veterumque vides monumenta virorum.-VIRG. BUT few works of the kings have escaped the ravages of time, and those built in the Etruscan style; consisting of a few layers of peperine stone, observable in the remains of the Tullian walls, the Tullian prison, and the triple arch of the Cloaca Maxima. Yet these remains, composed of large uncemented but regular blocks, though confessedly insufficient to enable us to retrace the architectural designs of the first Romans, may serve as a specimen of their public masonry, and, in the opinion of some, afford a plain indication of their early ambition, "which thus projected from its very infancy an eternal city,' the capital of the world." TULLIAN PRISON.-The remains of the Tullian prison stand at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, beneath the church of S. Pietro in Carcere. This prison was built by Ancus Martius, as we learn from Livy, who tells us that that king, "to repress the growing licentiousness, caused a prison to be constructed in the middle of the city, overlooking the Forum."-(Lib. i. c. 33). The subterranean part was added by Servius Tullius, and was thence called Tullianum. It was also denominated Robur; and if this is what Livy (Lib. xxxii. c. 26) means by the Carcer Lautumiarum-the prison of the stone quarries we may perhaps safely conclude that the excavation was originally made for the purpose of procuring stone, and that the quarry was afterwards converted into a prison. The steps, known by the name of the Scale Gemoniæ, by which criminals were dragged to prison or led out to execution, were near the entrance. The prison itself consists of two cells, one above the other, to which the only entrance was by a small aperture in the roof of the upper cell; while a similar aperture in its floor led to the cell below. The upper cell is seven-and-twenty feet in length, by twenty in width; the lower, which is of an oval form, is twenty by ten. The height of the former is fourteen feet, that of the latter only seven. Sallust (De Bello Cat. c. 55) gives us the following description of it:-"In the prison, known by the name of the Tullian prison, on descending a little, you come to a dungeon on the left, sunk to the depth of about twelve feet. Dead walls on all sides of it render escape impossible: above it is a cell vaulted with stone. Its uncleanliness, its darkness, and its noisome smell, make it a truly disgusting and horrible abode." These dungeons, it seems, served as the state prisons, being appropriated to persons of distinction. It was here, as we learn from Sallust, that the Catiline conspirators were confined and executed; it was here that Jugurtha perished of hunger; here, too, it was that Sejanus, that sport of fortune, met the punishment due to his crimes; and that Perseus, the last of the Macedonian kings, dragged on a miserable existence, till, towards the close of life, he was removed, at the intercession of so at his conqueror, Paulus Emilius, to a less frightful abode. Here, too, St. Peter and St. Paul were immuredleast the guide would have you believe-and how can you refuse to give credit to his statement, when, in attestation of it, he produces two standing miracles? St. Peter, it seems, struck his head violently against the side of the prison, and instead of fracturing his skull, as an ordinary man might have done, he indented the wall; and in the solid rock the eyes of the faithful still discern a tolerable impression of his features! Again; it happened that, during his imprisonment, many converts came to be baptized by him, and, as there was no water in the place, Peter caused a fountain to spring up in the centre of the dungeon-which fountain still remains! The limited size of the Tullian prison, compared with that of the numberless jails now scattered over every part of Europe, has been adduced as an instance of the remarkable difference between the ancient and modern systems of government; for, if we may believe Juvenal, this was the only prison in old Rome:— Sub Regibus atque Tribunis Viderunt uno contentam carcere Romam.-iii. 313. They saw, beneath their Kings', their Tribunes' reign, CLOACA MAXIMA.-Not far from the little Temple of Vesta may be seen the embouchure of the Cloaca Maxima*, which, though almost choked up by the artificial • A portion of it may also be seen near the Arch of Janus. elevation of modern Rome, still serves as the common sewer of the city, after a lapse of near three thousand years. The stones employed in the construction of the arch-which is a triple one, consisting of three concentrie rows, one above the other-are of great size, and placed together without cement. The height is the same as the width-about thirteen feet, though Marlianus makes the height and width three feet more. It seems, therefore, to have been no exaggeration to say, that the Cloaca was sufficiently large to admit a waggon loaded with hay. According to Livy's account, this work was commenced by Tarquinius Priscus, who "drained the low grounds of the city about the Forum and the valleys lying between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, by carrying sewers from a higher level into the Tiber."-(Lib. i. c. 38). But the drain was imperfect, and the work, according to the same authority, was completed by Tarquinius Superbus. "Tarquin the Proud made the great subterranean cloaca to carry off the filth of the city—a work so vast, that even the magnificence of the present age has not been able to equal it."—(Lib. i. c. 56). This celebrated work, however, has been referred to a much later period; and no wonder, when there are those who contend that the arch was unknown even in Greece till within a hundred years of the Christian era. Among other hypotheses, it has been assigned to Augustus; but this conjecture seems loaded with insuperable difficulties; for how are we to reconcile such a supposition with the silence of Suetonius, or with Livy's statement-that it was constructed by Tarquin? Pliny also, |