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which grew up the great Myth of Christianity: and if this be the legitimate principle of Christian history, what criterion of superior credibility have the four Gospels over the fifth by S. Bonaventure and Mr. Oakley, recently published for the edification of the English Church?

We have quoted but one sample; we could easily give fifty in the same strain. It is a serious question to deal with a peasantry in whom legendary faith has been, as it were, a part of their baptismal creed, who have been nursed, and cradled, and matured in this atmosphere of religious fiction, lest, when we pluck up the tares, we pluck up the wheat also. But deliberately to load Christianity again with all the lies of which it has gradually disburthened itself, appears to us the worst kind of infidelity both in its origin and in its consequences; infidelity as implying total mistrust in the plain Christianity of the Bible; infidelity as shaking the belief in all religious truth. It may be well to have the tenderest compassion for those who have been taught to worship relics, or to kneel in supplication before the image of the Virgin; but to attempt to force back, especially on an unimaginative people, an antiquated superstition, is assuredly one of the most debasing offices to which high talents, that greatest and most perilous gift of God, can degrade themselves. If mankind has no alternative between the full, unquestioning, all-embracing, all-worshipping faith of the middle ages, and no faith at all, what must be the result with the reasoning and reflecting part of it? To this question we await an answer; but let this question be answered by those only who have considered it calmly, under no preconceived system, in all its bearings on the temporal and on the eternal interests of mankind.

446

VIII.

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SEPULCHRES.

(July, 1865.)

It has been often said that the English traveller usually enters Rome the wrong way. It has never been better said than in an old book, by one who, as many men living may recollect, was held in the highest esteem and affection in the University of Oxford, Professor Edward Burton, whose early death cut him off prematurely from those highest ecclesiastical honours, which might have been commanded by his profound but modest learning, his singularly calm, yet, at the same time, singularly liberal, mind. We quote the passage in respect for his memory, and as expressing our own sentiments with peculiar force and distinctness.

Most people picture to themselves a certain spot, from whence the towers and domes of the Eternal City burst upon their view. St. Peter's, with its cupola, the immense ruins of the Colosseum, the Pillar of Trajan, and such well-known objects, are all crowded into the ideal scene; and the imagination is raised to the utmost pitch in expectation of every moment unfolding this glorious prospect. The traveller, after feasting upon this hope, and using it to console himself for the barrenness of the Campagna and the uninteresting uniformity of the view, approaches nearer and nearer without reaching the expected spot. His tour-book tells him that near the post of Baccano, fourteen miles from Rome, the dome of St. Peter's is first visible. This will be the commencement of his delight. But he still disregards the speck in

Via Appia dalla Porta Capena a Boville. Descritta dal Commendatore L. Canina, 2 vols. Roma. 1853. La Roma Sotterranea Christiana. Descritta ed. illustrata dal Cav. G. B. de Rossi. Roma. 1864. Immagine Scelte della B. Vergine Maria, tratte dalle Catacombe Romane. Roma. 1863.

the horizon, anxiously looking for the happier moment when the whole city is discovered. This moment unfortunately never arrives. Where that place is to be found in the approach from Florence, which affords such a feast to the eye and to the imagination, I never could discover. The view of Rome from the Monte Mario, a hill near this road, is perhaps one of the noblest and the most affecting which the world could produce; and it may be suspected that some writers, full of the gratification which this prospect afforded, have transferred it in description to their first entrance. But the road itself discloses the city by degrees. Scarcely any of it is seen till within a small distance, and then, with the exception of St. Peter's, there are few buildings of interest. The antiquities lie mostly on the other side, and are not seen at all. The suburbs themselves are not picturesque [they are mean, commonplace, like the entrance to an English watering-place], and the traveller finds himself actually in Rome before he has given up the hopes of enjoying the distant prospect of it.

Had he entered the city from Naples, his feelings might have been very different. This is the direction from which Rome ought to be entered, if we wish our classical enthusiasm to be raised by the first view. The Campagna is here even more desolate, and to a greater extent, than it is on the side of Florence. For several miles the ground is strewed with ruins; some presenting considerable fragments, others only discernible by the inequality of the surface. It seems as if the cultivators of the soil had not dared to profane the relics of their ancestors; and from the sea on the left to the Apennines on the right, the eye meets with nothing but desolation and decay of grandeur. The Aqueducts rise above the other fragments, and seem purposely placed there to carry us back to the time of the Republic. The long lines of these structures stretch out in various directions. The arches are sometimes broken down; but the effect is heightened by these interruptions. In short, in travelling the last twelve miles on this road, the mind may indulge in every reflection upon Roman greatness, and find the surrounding scenery perfectly in unison. From this road, too, the whole city is actually surveyed. The domes and cupolas are more numerous than from any other quarter; beside which, some of the ancient edifices themselves are added to the picture. After entering the walls, we pass the Colosseum, catch a view of the Forum, the Capitol, and other antiquities, which were familiar to us from ancient authors.2

Dr. Burton might have added, if he had not confined himself to heathen antiquities, that on his approach the traveller is

A Description of Rome, by the Rev. Edward Burton. London, 1828.

almost confronted by the vast portico of St. John Lateran, the most venerable, if not the most imposing, edifice of Christian Rome.

It must sadly be confessed that too many travellers, we fear English travellers, do not or cannot at present allow themselves the choice between these two alternatives. How many of our fellow-creatures are now shot into Rome from dreary Civita Vecchia, along the dreary morass, over which the railroad passes, to be deposited in a dreary station, as utterly unconscious as to any of the noble and stirring emotions, which used to attend the entrance into the Eternal City, as their portmanteau in the van. Verily there is truth in Mr. Ruskin's saying, that railroads have reduced man to a parcel,-all that he can desire, all that he can demand, is speedy and safe delivery.

But back to other and better thoughts-to worthier reminiscences. If such was the approach to Rome, fallen and in ruins, what was it to Rome in her glory and in her majesty! This line of approach-or rather for the last twelve miles parallel to this was the famous Appian Way, the Queen, as it is called by Statius, of the Roman roads; and this Appian Way, mile after mile, thronged with the sepulchres and the monuments of the illustrious dead. Conceive a Westminster Abbey of twelve or sixteen miles! on either side crowded with lofty tombs or votive edifices to the dead, and a quarter of a mile or half a mile deep; interrupted only here and there by some stately temple to the gods, or by some luxurious villa, around which perhaps the ashes of its former masters reposed in state; or by the gardens of some o'er-wealthy Seneca-Senecæ prædivitis hortis.' Think of Milton's glorious lines:

There be the gates; cast round thine eye, and see
What conflux issuing forth, or entering in:

Prætors, proconsuls, to their provinces

Hasting, or to return, in robes of state;

Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,

In various habits, on the Appian road,

Or on th' Emilian; some from farthest South,
Syene, and where the shadow both ways falls,
Meroe, Nilotic isle; and more to West,

The realm of Bocchus to the Black-moor sea;
From the Asian kings and Parthian, among these,
From India, and the golden Chersonese,

And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane,

Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreath'd.

We break off our quotation with these tributary visitorssome from Brundusium, the port at which the Eastern, at least the Asiatic, embassies usually landed. From the other coast might be seen (remember Horace's minus est gravis Appia tardis') the high-born, wealthy, or famous Romans, travelling in their state from their luxurious Campanian villas, and, with those who landed at Naples or Puteoli, offering a perpetual gorgeous spectacle along the road. It would be perhaps pressing too hard another passage in Horace, in which he describes the splendid noble, 'well known under the portico of Agrippa, and along the Appian road,' yet doomed to the same common fate with the old kings of Rome, as if it contained an allusion to the wayside sepulchres through which the great man passed :

Cùm bene notum

Porticus Agrippa, et via te conspexerit Appî,
Ire tamen restat Numa quò devenit et Ancus.
Epist. i. 6, 25.

This was perhaps too deep a moral for the graceful satirist.
Not indeed that the Appian was peculiarly, perhaps not pre-
eminently, distinguished for these solemn and stately memorials
of the illustrious dead. Juvenal speaks of those

whose ashes lay

By the Flaminian or the Latin way.

Quorum Flaminiâ tegitur cinis, atque Latinâ.

Now, however, the greater length of this 'Street of Tombs,' and the fortunate diversion of the Brundusian and Neapolitan

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