flank the arch is 22.065 feet.

pedestals 9 feet high.

They stand on

Our next visit in Rome should be paid to-

THE COLISEUM,

or Colosseum, with which almost every reader has been made familiar by the numerous drawings that exist of it. This immense Amphitheatre, moreover, has been immortalized by the genius of Byron, whose picture of it is touched with living colours, and is, perhaps, the only picture that does aught like justice to the wonders of the reality:-*

I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's walls,
'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome;
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bayed beyond the Tiber; and
More near, from out the Cæsars' palace, came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song

Began and died upon the gentle wind.

Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach
Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood
Within a bow-shot-where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through ruined battlements,
And twines its roots with the imperial hearths;
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth ;-
But the gladiator's bloody circus stands,

A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls,

* Lord Byron, “Manfred."

Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.

And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which softened down the hoar austerity

Of rugged Desolation, and filled up,

As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries;
Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old;—

The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns."

The Amphitheatre was begun by the Emperor Vespasian in A.D. 72; on the site of Nero's Pond, or the Stagnum Neronis, and dedicated by Titus in his eighth consulate, A.D. 80, ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem. It was not completed, however, until the reign of Domitian. According to a tradition of the Roman Church, it was designed by Gaudentius, a Christian architect and martyr, and several thousand captive Jews were forced to labour at its construction. From the later Emperors it received successive additions, and continued to be repaired and altered at different times until the beginning of the sixth century. Here were celebrated those cruel gladiatorial spectacles-those combats of man against man, and man against wild beastswhich the bloodthirsty Romans of the later age so keenly delighted in. At the dedication of the building by Titus, five thousand beasts of prey— lions, panthers, tigers, and leopards—were slaugh

tered in the arena; and the games in honour of the event lasted for nearly one hundred days. The gladiatorial combats were abolished by Honorius. A show of wild beasts in the reign of Theodoric, and a bull-fight at the expense of the Roman nobles in 1332, are the last exhibitions in the arena of the Coliseum of which history has preserved any record.

During the persecutions of the Christians these walls were the silent witnesses of many a terrible scene. In the reign of Trajan, St. Ignatius was brought from Antioch and flung to be devoured by wild beasts in the Coliseum; and here old age and youth, the father, the son, the wife, the virgin, sealed the evidence of their faith in blood. In blood are its annals written, and the warmest enthusiast in art can scarcely regret the decay of a structure associated with such memories of barbarous cruelty.

Gibbon describes the Coliseum with his customary pomp of language.* "It was a building," he says, "of an elliptic figure, 564 feet in length and 467 in breadth, founded on fourscore arches, and rising, with four successive orders of architecture, to the height of 140 feet. The outside of the edifice was encrusted with marble, and decorated with statues. The slopes of the vast

Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of Rome," i. 416, 417.

concave which formed the inside, were filled and surrounded with sixty or eighty rows of seats of marble, likewise covered with cushions, and capable of receiving with ease above fourscore thousand spectators. Sixty-four vomitories (for by that name the doors were very aptly distinguished) poured forth the immense multitude; and the entrances, passages, and staircases were contrived with such exquisite skill, that each person, whether of the senatorial, the equestrian, or the plebeian order, arrived at his destined place without trouble or confusion. Nothing was omitted which, in any respect, could be subservient to the convenience and pleasure of the spectators. They were protected from the sun and rain by an ample canopy, occasionally drawn over their heads. The air was continually refreshed by the playing of fountains, and profusely impregnated by the grateful scent of aromatics. In the centre of the edifice, the arena, or stage, was strewed with the finest sand, and successively assumed the most different forms. At one moment it seemed to rise out of the earth, like the garden of the Hesperides, and was afterward broken into the rocks and caverns of Thrace. The subterraneous pipes conveyed an inexhaustible supply of water; and what had just before appeared a level plain, might be suddenly converted