celebrity must necessarily be taller than his neighbours.

So far from being hills of extraordinary elevation, however, I have even had my doubts whether some of them can be called hills at all. I think they should rather be called banks or braes, not so much because they are little, as because they have an ascent on one side only. The Palatine, the Aventine, the Capitol, and even the Cœlian, are indeed legitimate, if not lofty mounts; but the Esquiline and the Quirinal, though they certainly boast a pretty considerable rise on the side of Rome, have no fall on the opposite side, as far as I can discover. As for the Viminal Hill, I have never yet been able to find it at all, though I have made a most diligent search after it. Nor is it invisible to my eyes only, for I have never yet been so fortunate as to meet with any one hardy enough to maintain that he had himself seen it, though some believe in it, and all talk of it with due respect, as if it were still in existence; whereas it is, in truth, a deceased mount; and not only dead, but buried. The fall of the ruins from the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills, between which it was situated, together with that of its own buildings, has interred it with them in one common grave.

Let us, however, ascend all that now remain of the Seven Hills of Ancient Rome; and while from their summit we recall all the works of magnificence and fame that once overspread them, let us bestow one glance on the aspect they now present to the

eye of a stranger, whose far distant pilgrimage has been made to visit them.

The Palatine Hill, to which we must first direct our steps, is now, as it was anciently, square; and its circumference, or rather its quadrangle,—for it has four corners, is said to be a full mile.

With all my respect for this venerable mount, I must say that it is very little. I had previously been disappointed in the lowly height of the Capitol; but I stood yet more amazed at the square, flattopped, and dwarfish elevation of the Palatine. It must certainly have been materially degraded by the fall of the successive generations of buildings, which have stood on it, from the straw-roofed cottages of Romulus and his Roma Quadrata, to the crumbling erections of Popes and Cardinals. The ruins of these multifarious edifices, heaped up round its base, have raised the surface at least twenty feet above the ancient level; still, with all the allowances one can make, it must originally have been very little of a hill indeed.

It is not, therefore, in any respect to its appearance that we owe the sensations of admiration and undying interest with which we regard it. It is, that every step we tread here is big with recollec tions for it was the scene of early glory, the spot where Rome grew into greatness and fell into decay-where those immortal spirits lived and acted who have been through successive ages the luminaries of the earth, and where the light first dawned of that freedom and civilization which still sheds its

brightness through the world. That spot which once comprized the whole of Rome; which, till the extinction of the republic, contained the dwellings of her senators, and the temples of her gods; but which, during the empire, was found to be too circumscribed for the wants of one individual; is now heaped with the wide-spreading ruins of that maguificent edifice which was the abode of her tyrants, and the tomb of her liberties.

Over the wide expanse of the Palatine-successively peopled with a race of warlike kings, with the orators, the philosophers, and the heroes of the republic, and with the crowded population of an imperial court-no human dwelling or habitation is now to be seen, except where one solitary convent shelters a few bare-footed friars, and where, amid the ruined arches and buried halls of the Palace of the Cæsars, the labourers of the vineyards and cabbage gardens that now flourish over them, have made their wretched abodes.

But let us look back from the melancholy desolation of its present state to earlier times.

The history of the Palatine Hill is an epitome of that of civilized society. From the days when Romulus encompassed it with a plough-share, and raised upon it the humble sheds of his followers, and the straw-roofed cottage of their chief, it progressively advanced through the stages of convenience, embellishment, and splendour, till it reached the extreme of luxury and magnificence in the Domus Aurea of Nero. From that period, it gra

dually declined to its last degenerate state of ruin, and has now become once more deserted.

A fanciful mind might say, that before the Romans it exhibited the pastoral age; in their early times, the iron age; in the close of the republic, and dawn of the empire, the golden age; and, for many a century back, the age of brass, the last and

worst.

Besides a brief account, in two folio volumes, of the early history of the Palatine Hill, many long and learned treatises have been written on the fruitful subject of its etymology. Whether it took its names from Pales, the goddess of sheep, who used to tend her flocks here, or from Pallas, the goddess of wisdom, or from Pallas, the great-grandfather of Evander, or from Palas, an Arcadian town, or from Palatium, a city in the territory of Reate, (which was one of the many places that sent a colony to this hill,) or from Palantes, which bore allusion to the wandering tribes that dwelt upon it, I leave you to decide; settle it exactly as you like best.

Again, as we are upon the head of etymology, I must beg you to remember, that, having derived its own name from-something, it certainly gave the name of Palatium to the habitation of the Kings of Rome, from whence the name of palace, in all European languages.

Though the year in which Rome was founded is disputed, the day is correctly ascertained.* It was

* Vide Livy, lib. i.

the 21st of April, and in commemoration of it, the Palilia, or festival of the pastoral goddess, Pales, continued to be celebrated as long as the Kings, the Consuls, or the Emperors of the Romans held their ancient seat in the Palatine; for it was not till the government was removed to Byzantium, and Christianity was established in the land by Constantine, that this festival was discontinued.

The straw-roofed cottage of Romulus, beside which grew the sacred cornel tree, was on the northwestern side of the hill, looking down on the "Pulchrum Littus ;"* but vainly should we now seek to ascertain its exact site. As vainly should we look for the Velia where the house of Publicola stood, or for the Sub Velia beneath it, scarcely less famed in the annals of the republic. The former is conjectured to have been the summit of the Palatine Hill between the Churches of S. Toto and S. Anastasio, and the latter, a sloping descent which led down from thence to the Valabrum. As vainly should we look for the Lupercal, which must have been on this north side of the mount, or for any traces of all the temples, the altars, the porticos, and the multifarious buildings that stood here before the days of Augustus-or seek to discover the vanished sites of the houses of the Gracchi, of Hortensius, of Crassus, of Clodius, of Catiline, and of Cicero,-whose house, you may remember, was destroyed on his exile, through the successful cabal of Clodius, rebuilt by

*Plutarch's Life of Romulus.