However, if I allowed myself to go on about the cats of Rome, either ancient or modern, there would be no end. For instance, in a statuary's shop in the Via Sistina there is a large yellow cat, which I one day saw dressing the hair of the statuary's boy. It performed this office with a very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to time, as it licked the boy's thick, black locks, to get the effect of its labors. On other days or at other hours it slept under the table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even in Rome, where cats are so abundant, it was a notable cat.
If you visit the Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be hurried home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way hotelward at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier time, but which, is now superseded by the more authentic temple in the Forum. I had long revered the first in its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute of unwilling renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle, than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the Popolo Romano into the cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how deep it was. He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee, and it seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near lunch-time, let the traveller look well about him in the dusty little piazza there, for the Temple of Fortune, with its bruised but beautiful facade, is hard by, as much in the form that Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected after all this time.
Perhaps the Circus of Marcellus is on the traveller's way home to lunch; but he will always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in with mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the circus. A glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to the Campidoglio, with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto. It is hardly possible that his glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he sits his bronze charger—an extremely fat one—so majestically in the piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.
A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed five times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor's in the next piazza (at Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost worn your new clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having a general effect in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune, or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it is housed on the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is that I believe the Temple of Neptune would have been superior to either fate; though I may be mistaken.
Ruin, nearly everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the environment; and even the monuments of the past which are in comparatively good repair have not always the keeping that the past would probably have chosen for them. One that suffers as little as any, if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch you are apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside it or across its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with post-card boys and their bargains. In spite of them, the sight of the temple does mightily lift the heart; and though you may have had, as I had, forty-odd years to believe in it, you must waver in doubt of its reality whenever you see it. It seems too great to be true, standing there in its immortal sublimity, the temple of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the saints by Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration equally as classic or catholic. It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in the very latest edition of Murray's Handbook as “the best-preserved monument of ancient Rome”; worthy the praise of the fastidious and difficult Hare as “the most perfect pagan building in the city”; worthy whatever higher laud my unconsulted Baedeker bestows upon it. But I speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if he comes upon it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its vast bronze doors closing against him until three o'clock; there are many sadder things in life than not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely relieve.
I proved the fact by successive visits; but, after all my content with the outside of the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome is not the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building, but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get this in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine Hill, but you get something more nearly like it than anything I can think of at the moment. In that imperial and patrician and plutocratic residential quarter you see, if you are of the moderately moneyed middle class, what the pride of life must always come to when it has its way; and your consolation is full if you pause to reflect how some day Fifth Avenue and the two millionaire blocks eastward will be as the Palatine now is.
Riches and power are of the same make in every time, though they may wear different faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very wealthy members of our smart set to keep this fact in mind when they visit that huge sepulchre of human vainglory.
But I will not pretend that I did so myself that matchless April morning when I climbed over the ruins of the Palatine and found the sun rather sickeningly hot there. That is to say, it was so in the open spaces which were respectively called the house of this emperor and that, the temple of this deity or that, whose divine honors half the Caesars shared; in the Stadium, beside the Lupercal, and the like. The Lupercal was really imaginable as the home of the patroness wolf of Rome, being a wild knot of hill fitly overgrown with brambles and bushes, and looking very probably the spot where Caesar would thrice have refused the crown that Antony offered him. But for the rest, one ruin might very well pass for another; a temple with a broken statue and the stumps of a few columns could very easily deceive any one but an archaeologist. Fortunately we had the charming companionship of one of the most amiable of archaeologists, who was none the less learned for being a woman; and she made even me dimly aware of identities which would else have been lost upon me. To be sure, I think that without help I should have known the Stadium when I came to it, because it seemed studied from that in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, though it was indefinitely more dilapidated, was so obviously meant for the same sorts of games and races. I do not know but it was larger than the Cambridge Stadium, though I will not speak so confidently of its size as of that deathly cold in the vaults and subterranean passages by which we found our way to the burning upper air out of the foundations and basements of palaces and temples and libraries and theatres that had ceased to be.
