recalling often old prints of the Romans of history. The dress of the poorer women is ancient, while that of the upper classes is as modern as the costumes of Paris, Berlin, or London. On days of fête it is interesting to watch these people at play, all animated with a southern gaiety which the northerner may envy. The life of Rome is outdoor; folk loiter and congregate in the streets; there is much traffic of vehicles used for pleasure. Over the city stretches “the Italian sky,” ardently blue—the sky that we know from paintings before we have visited Rome—and upon the white buildings shines a hot sun from which we shrink in midsummer noons.

It is hard to decide which appeals to us the more strongly in Rome—the relics of Cæsar’s empire or the art of the Middle Ages. The Coliseum brings to mind “the grandeur that was Rome,” in the days of the pagan majesty, while St Peter’s, with its wealth of gorgeous decoration and great paintings, reminds us of the supreme power of the city under the popes.

In the Coliseum there is social history written in stone. We look upon the tiers rising one above the other, and picture them in all the splendour of a day of cruel carnival. We may see traces of the lifts that brought the beasts to the arena from the dens below.

Ad leones! The trumpet blares, and a victim of the heretical creed is led into the amphitheatre to encounter the lions. How often has this soil been drenched in blood. How often have the walls echoed with the plaudits of the Roman populace, gloating upon a spectacle of torture, or aroused to ecstasy by the combats of gladiators.

Silence broods in the arena, and in every interstice the maidenhair fern grows rife among the decaying stones. The glory has departed, but the shell of the Flavian amphitheatre remains as a monument of Rome’s imperial days. Here were held the chariot races, the competitions of athletes, the tournaments on horseback, the baiting of savage brutes, the wrestling bouts, throwing the spear, and the fights of martyrs with animals. Luxury and cruelty rioted here on Roman holidays.

For a comprehensive view of the Coliseum, you should climb the Palatine Hill. The hundreds of arches and windows admit the sunlight, and the building glows, “a monstrous mountain of stone,” as Michelet describes it. Tons of the masonry have been removed by vandals. The fountain in which the combatants washed their wounds remains, and the walls of the circus rise to a height of a hundred-and-fifty-seven feet. In yonder “monument of murder” there died ten thousand victims in a hundred days during the reign of Trajan.

The triumph of Christianity is symbolised in St Peter’s. An impartial chronicler cannot close his eyes to the truth written in the great cathedral. Both pagans and Christians persecuted in turn to the glory of their deities. Force was worshipped alike by emperor and pope. Pagans tortured martyrs in the arena; the Christians burned them in the square. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake, and consumed in the flames, by decree of the Church, after two years of imprisonment. His offence was the writing of treatises attempting to prove that the earth is not flat, and that God is “the All in All.” He also dared to opine that there may be other inhabited worlds besides our own. Bruno’s last words have echoed through the ages: “Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pass the sentence upon me than I receive it.”

Under Innocent IV. the Inquisition was established as a special tribunal against heretics. Men of science soon came under its penalties. Copernicus was a teacher of mathematics in Rome, when he conceived his theory, “The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,” which he dedicated to Pope Paul. Fearing the awful penalties of the Holy Office, he withheld publication of the work for many years, only seeing a copy of the printed volume in his last hours. The book was condemned by the Inquisition and placed on the index.

About a century later, Galileo wrote his “System of the World,” an exposition and defence of the theories of Copernicus. The Inquisition dragged him before its tribunal at Rome, where he was charged with heresy and compelled to recant or die. We know that he chose recantation, or the fate of Bruno would have been his. For ten years Galileo pined in the dungeon, and his body was flung into a dishonoured grave.

Not a man in Rome was safe from the Inquisition. Its courts travestied justice; its terrified witnesses lied, and the accusers were intimidated. Suspicion alone was sufficient to compel arrest and trial, and there was no possible appeal, and no hope of pity or leniency. The Church urged that while unbelief existed, the Inquisition was a necessity, and the chief means of stamping out heretical doctrine. And yet, a few years ago, an International Free-thought Congress was held under the shadow of St Peter’s. How truly, “it moves!”

The Renaissance, with its mighty intellectual impetus, its reverence for the arts and culture, and its resistance against the absolutism of the Papacy came as the salvation of Rome from the terrors and the stagnation of the dark days.

The birth of Michael Angelo, in 1474, came with a new era of enlightenment. Angelo, painter, sculptor, poet, and philosopher, was commissioned by Pope Julius II. to carve a great work in Rome, and to adorn the Sistine Chapel with frescoes. Three years were spent on these superb paintings. This is the most wonderful ceiling painting in the world. In the centre are pictures of scenes of the Creation and Fall; in compartments are the prophets, and other portions represent the ancestors of the Virgin Mary and historical characters.

The figures are colossal, and wonderful in their anatomy, revealing the artist’s richness of imagination, as well as his unsurpassed technical skill. To see to advantage the frescoes of the roof, it is necessary to lie flat on the back, and gaze upwards. The human figure is superbly imaged in “The Temptation, Fall and Expulsion.” The largest figures in the whole composition are among the prophets and sibyls.

“Here, at last, here indeed for the first time,” writes Mr Arthur Symons, in his “Cities,” “is all that can be meant by sublimity; a sublimity which attains its pre-eminence through no sacrifice of other qualities; a sublimity which (let us say it frankly) is amusing. I find the magnificent and extreme life of these figures as touching, intimate, and direct in its appeal, as the most vivid and gracious realism of any easel picture.”

The vast picture of “The Last Judgment,” on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, was painted by Michael Angelo when he was growing old. The work occupied about seven years. It is full of figures in every kind of action, and most of them are nude. Their nakedness affronted Paul IV., who commanded Da Volterra, a pupil of Angelo, to paint clothing on some of the forms, thus marring the beauty of the work.

In the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican are two mural paintings by Michael Angelo, “The Crucifixion of St Peter,” and “The Conversion of St Paul.”

“I could only see and wonder,” writes Goethe, referring to the works of Angelo in a letter from Rome. The mental confidence and boldness of the master, and his grandeur of conception, are beyond all expression.

Sir Joshua Reynolds spent some time in Rome, in 1750, and recorded the result of his study of the work of Raphael and Michael Angelo. It was in the cold chambers of the Vatican that Reynolds caught the chill which brought about his deafness. He made many copies of parts of the paintings of Angelo.