pavement was placed for pedestrians, and then only one side of the Corso boasted a narrow footpath. The streets were encumbered with hucksters' stalls, with refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark as pitch, and hygiene was only hinted at in the marble affiches which may still be seen at certain old street corners announcing that monsignore the way warden would visit with a fine of 25 scudi and divers bodily pains the practice of emptying every kind of refuse into the side streets.

Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages the cry of "Vandals!" goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right to be called "the eternal city" than her survival of the material ruin to which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth and Vandal have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and popes is recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who stripped the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of Saint Peter's:—Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini. It is a curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of as "barbarians," should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace in Rome. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of Rome—barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders, internecine brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each brought the opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of destruction must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from the time of the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings are doomed on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor Emmanuel II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway system—while the House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is dishonoured—the Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those who killed the prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres. But when "new Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given us what the learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never compassed—an excavated Forum.

There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the Ghetto and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence. This brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life—the beggars. Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always had troops of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the Antonines as in that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the latest of the sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced beggar who was licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint Peter lived to the closing years of the century and gave a dowry of 200,000 francs to his daughter on her marriage. The difficulties which met the Roman of the era of Gregory the Great when pest and the transition to the agricultural system of coloni threw the serfs upon the streets, met the government of Italy when after September 1870 the whole motley crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian system of alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the streets of the city. Those who remember the "seventies" or the "eighties" in Rome remember the menacing manner in which "alms" were "asked," how near together were blessing and cursing, and how unfrequented roads and hills were beset by sturdy beggars, lineal descendants of the brigand who placing his hat in the roadway levelled his gun at you as he proffered the request: "For the love of God put something in that hat."

Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on wet days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum; doles of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising members of their congregations. The men women and children who had passed their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viaticum and funeral processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions, were suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern spirit—hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the restaurants, these latest recruits to the commercial spirit exchanged the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade without ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and simple. Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging. The great and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to the excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding—in the San Lorenzo quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with five, six, and even seven families living in one room. The mania for building in the "eighties" led to the "building crisis"; streets of unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the "improvements" of the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help; they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies and dowries come their way.

TEMPLE OF SATURN FROM THE BASILICA JULIA IN THE FORUM
The Capitol is to the left. The temple is built at the foot of the Capitol hill. See pages 3, 13, 30, 91.

The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The maximum was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors—2 millions, but even in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered 1,300,000. A period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us to the date of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this number by more than a million (a.d. 335). After a thousand years of Christian domination the population of the city had sunk to its minimum, 17,000 (a.d. 1377). Even in the reign of the magnificent Leo X. it was not more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of the seventeenth century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily increased, till in 1800 the population numbered 153,000. But during the "empire," 1812, it fell to 118,000. Ten years after "the Italians" entered Rome it had increased by 79,000, to 305,000. The last census, 1900, shows a resident population of 450,000—not a third of its classical total—and Naples is still the most densely populated city of Italy.

The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of "Pallas"; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune—those liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the gentes and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth century; but the life