ART. V.-1. Beschreibung der Stadt Rom. Von E. PLATNER, C. BUNSEN, &c., mit Beyträger, von B. G. NIEBUHR. 8vo. 3 vols. Stuttgart: 1829-1842.-(Description of the City of Rome. By E. PLATNER, C. BUNSEN, &c. With Contributions, by B. G. NIEBUHR.)

2. Die Basiliken des Christlichen Roms. Von CHRISTIAN KARL JOSIAS BUNSEN. Folio. Munich: 1844.-(The Basilicas of Christian Rome. By CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAH BUNSEN.)

WHATEVER interest can attach to any department of topographical or antiquarian discussion, must unquestionably attach to the general subject of these volumes. Whatever may be the importance generally of an accurate study, or still more of an actual view, of celebrated places, belongs peculiarly to the sight of capital cities. Whether, as in Italy, the life of the people has flowed from the towns; or, as in Germany, the life of the towns has flowed from the people: whether, like London, the capital is the city of a great nation; or, like France, the people is the nation of a great city: whether, like Venice or Athens, they are the creations of a great republic; or, like Berlin and St Petersburg, the creations of a great sovereign,-there is always something in the insight afforded by the first glance into the history of their inhabitants, which nothing else can supply. Such emphatically is the interest which is attached to Rome; with this great distinction, however, that it is attached to her, not as the capital of the modern Papal States, nor even as the capital of the ancient senate and people, but as the Metropolis of the World, in a sense which is true of no other city before or since. This is the peculiar charm of Rome. Its works of art, ancient and modern, are in part accidentally connected with it-in part shared by other less distinguished places. Its importance, in the general history of the world, is equalled, if not surpassed, by Athens and Jerusalem; but its significance, as the capital of the ancient civilized world, is what it possesses alone; and what leaves on all who are affected by it at all, the most abiding impression which they carry away from its walls. What is true of the topography of Greece as a country, is true of the topography of Rome as a city. It is a true instinct which has prefaced all the histories of Greece by a description of the country, and not of the particular towns; and the histories of Rome by a description of the city, and not of the country in which it was situated. Whatever details may occur of Athenian or Spartan localities in Thirlwall, are lost in the interest

of his general sketch of Greece. Whatever notices may occur of Italian geography in Arnold, will be found rather in his lectures on modern history than in his history of Rome.

And to this great subject have been devoted the labours not of mere antiquarians or topographers, but of men who, whilst they have acquired an European celebrity for the depth and universality of their knowledge, have also taken an interest in the fortunes of ancient Rome amounting almost to personal enthusiasm. Few educated Englishmen who have visited Rome for the last twenty years, can forget the kindness and information they have received from the little colony of Germans which still is clustered on the western height of the Capitol, though time has deprived it of some of its most distinguished ornaments. Of these, many are doubtless altogether unknown to the English public; but two of the names in the title-page of the Description of the City of Rome, will at once arrest the attention of every reader. One is the illustrious historian Niebuhr, who here added the last finish to his almost intuitive knowledge of the state of ancient Rome; and whose dwelling-place beside the Theatre of Marcellus rightly claims a place in the history of the city, with which his name must be for ever associated. The other is his successor Bunsen, of whom it would be superfluous to speak to Englishmen, were it not almost necessary to recall his earlier fame, as the friend of Niebuhr, and the restorer of Roman topography, before it is eclipsed by his more recent works in History and Theology-were it not a pleasure to have again brought before us the recollections of that delightful residence on the brow of the Tarpeian height, so long the resort of all that was most elevated and enlightened in Roman society.

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To enter into the details of this great work would here be out of place. Yet it is impossible, in turning over its pages, not to conjure up those images of greatness, which, having been once seen, can never pass away from the mind; and which-though no description, not even one which like this unites the strictest scientific accuracy with the most fervent poetical enthusiasm, can ever entirely reproduce them-are yet susceptible of such a delineation as will illustrate their inseparable connexion with the history which they have witnessed.

It is no slight gain, even at the outset, to one who looks on Rome with historical eyes, that, through all the vicissitudes of soil and buildings, it is still easy to discern the primitive aspect of the

As in Mr Merivale's excellent History of the Roman Emperors; in the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society-now unfortunately ended, or at least interrupted.

place. This is more important as a ground of actual study than many are aware of. In most celebrated places, especially those of modern history, the chief advantage of ocular inspection, or of minute realization of localities, consists merely in the greater vividness with which the images of the past are thus recalled. Whatever connexion may exist between the place and the event is either accidental, or, if the congruity be so striking as to compel the belief in some deeper coincidence, it belongs to an order of Providence which we cannot interpret. But in the more primitive history of the human race, or of particular nations, this connexion is not imaginary but real; the influence of the physical features of a country on the original character of its inhabitants, is as clearly one of the secondary means of Providential agency as any that can be named. Hence it is that no spots are so really instructive to the traveller in Greece, as the primeval sanctuaries of Delphi and Lebadea, or the patriarchal fastnesses of Tiryns and Mycenæ ;-hence, we should imagine, the history of the Jewish people would receive a more lively illustration from the Terebinths of Hebron, or the Granite precipices of Sinai, than from the sight even of Jerusalem itself,-connected as it chiefly is with a period when the first awful impressiveness of natural scenery was beginning to fade away before a higher and more universal influence. In like manner, the Englishman of the twenty-fifth century after the foundation of Rome, may still watch at their very cradle one at least of the powers which helped to produce the Roman people. When we stand on the slope of the Alban hills-on the rim of the crater of their extinct volcano, and look down into the calm lake reposing, Avernus-like, within it, under the shade of its surrounding forests—we have before us the very scene which brooded over the mysterious infancy of the first founders of the Roman name; with an influence as potent as that which, in their own august mythology, the twins were supposed to have drunk in with their first breath from the wolf who suckled them. When we feel the ground of the seven hills swelling beneath our feet -when we trace their original fastness-like character in the precipitous face of the Capitoline cliff, or the abrupt and wooded slope of the Aventine-when we observe the two outlying ramparts of the Janiculan and the Pincian ranges, warding off such incursions as swept away the towns in the open plains, yet allowing of such expansion as would afterwards befit the mistress of the world;-when we see this, and contrast it with the situation of almost every other ancient town in Italy-the Etrurian and Volscian fortresses on the narrow crests of their native rocks, the Campanian cities lost in the luxuriance of their level and

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fertile plains-it is difficult not to recognise something of that fore-shadowing of the future destinies of the Eternal City, which the Romans themselves delighted to trace in the prophetic augury of the twelve vultures of Romulus; or the refusal of Terminus to leave his wonted place amongst the gods of the Capitol. The race, the language, the institutions, the religion of the Romans have perished-the very facts of their early history have disappeared; but the framework from which all these received their impression at the time when they were most susceptible of outward impressions, still remains,-mutilated, but not destroyed or deprived of its peculiar meaning.

Again, we have said that it is the peculiar distinction of Rome to have been not merely a capital, but the capital of the the world in a sense in which no other city has been or is likely to be again that, though never the capital of Italy, it yet did eventually become the capital of the ancient civilized world. And it is precisely of this closing period-not of the period of its growth and of its struggles-that the Roman ruins bear the deepest impress. We do not deny that even the times of the commonwealth derive considerable light from the sight of the Forum; and it is one of the greatest merits of the French Essay which Chevalier Bunsen has published on the subject, that, now for the first time, a representation of that immortal spot has been laid before us; which is not only true, but gives to almost every existing vestige an intelligible object and meaning. What a mist is rolled away from our eyes the moment that we are allowed to trace the course of the Via Sacra up to the Temple of the Capitoline Jupiter on its rightful place upon the Tarpeian rock, and to find the true direction of the Forum in the open space between the Capitol and the Colosseum; instead of being dragged aside by the perverse ingenuity of Italian Topographers to look for it between the Capitol and the Tiber! How naturally does the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators rise before us, when, in the substructions which lie immediately beneath the scene of their imprisonment in the Mamertine prison, we recognise the basements of the Temple of Concord, in which the Senate was convened to pronounce the fatal sentence! How lively is the interest with which we regard the three pillars which stand immediately in front of the ancient Treasury, hewn out of the Capitoline rock, when we discover in them the remains of the Temple of Saturn, whose gates the Tribune vainly endeavoured to defend, against the attempts of Cæsar to appropriate the treasures of the state which lay behind it !

Still when from particular details we turn to the general effect

of the whole scene, there can be no doubt that it is not Republican, but Imperial Rome, which rivets our attention. It is almost startling to observe the peculiar significance of almost all that remains of that time, when its material and outward aspect most truly represented its inward life. Let any one look over the mass of ruins within the city, as he stands on the tower of the Capitol, the Temple of Vespasian, vindicating by its solitary grandeur its just title to the recently recovered name which connects it with the restorer of the city, after the desolation which had laid it waste from Galba to Vitellius-the crash of the Palace of the Cæsars on the hill from which it derives its name the huge mountain of the Amphitheatre of Titus-the three triumphal arches, each with the mark of destiny on its front: or let him gaze on that perhaps yet sublimer view without the city, which is commanded by the terrace of the Lateran Church-the desolate Campagna, with the ever-varying lights and shades empurpling its deep indentations-the long files of broken aqueducts advancing as if in melancholy cavalcades towards the city which they never reach; and he will feel that he has seen the ruin of the most august power that was ever enthroned upon the earth-he will understand how truly the Apocalyptic Seer saw in the imperial city which sat upon the Seven Hills, though in a greater and more awful form, a true revival of no less than the ancient Babylon.

Lastly, the Roman antiquarian has one more province to explore of the deepest historical interest-the city not of the Republic, not of the Cæsars, but of the early Christians. We say advisedly of the early Christians; for of the Rome of later Christendom-of the great capital of the Papacy, there is nothing, or hardly any thing, on which the historical eye can fasten. One transient gleam from the life of Rienzi lights up the scene in front of the modern Capitol-one or two edifices are connected with the name, and only with the name, of Innocent III. But, generally speaking, in the interval between the eighth and the sixteenth century, the chasm is complete. Of no city in the world perhaps has the historical continuity been so entirely broken. We leap at once from the age of Gregory I. to the age of Leo X. There is hardly any great town of northern Europe, which has so little impress of the middle ages, as the city which rose as it were from the grave to be their capital. Already when we turn from the ruins of the Forum to the Modern Rome, we find that its interest for the artist has begun-but its interest for the historian has vanished-it has ceased to be the metropolis-it has become what it has been ever since-the Museum, of the world.

But,