If

ducts the traveller to the foot of Italy. But the gloomy fathers looked with disdain on the arts of beauty. indeed they had supplied them by soft or humane institutions, mankind might less have regretted their choicebut their substitutes were ferocious games, horrid sacrifices, the combats of the amphitheatre, eternal wars, and the subjugation of mankind. When the great Fabius had subjected Tarentum, then filled with the choicest works of Grecian art, being asked how they should be disposed of "Let us leave," said he, "their angry gods to the Tarentines;" and the elder Cato deprecated the arts of Greece, till age and knowledge had softened his austerity. Not so Marcellus, the Scipios, and the Lælii. While employed in Sicily, in forming the army which subdued Hannibal, the greatest of the Scipios relieved the toil of military duty, by the study of Grecian philosophy, and the inspection of its arts; and from the ruins of Carthage he introduced that poet, who became the prince of the Roman drama, and first gave harmony to its language. Marcellus, on the conquest of Syracuse, had sent to Rome its pictures and statues; but the graceful strangers were long viewed with cold surprise, and when at last they awakened the taste by which they had been created, Italy was filled with enthusiasm to obtain them, not by their cultivation, but by seizing them as a conqueror from the rest of mankind. The citizens of the Republic long coveted the Arts only as barbarians, and Rome was filled

with the works of Greece, by the rapacious hands of Sylla, Mummius and Verres.

The age of Augustus was the first of Roman art, and whether it was cultivated from policy or inclination, mankind will never regret the change, from scenes of blood and discord, to the works of taste it produced. But the age of the Arts was preceded by that of letters, and in this respect Augustus, as Alexander had done before, gave his name to that which had begun amidst the storms of the Republic, and been perfected before him. It was rather in the course, than at the end of the century in which he flourished, that Lucretius and Catullus had given birth to the Roman poetry, and that Tibullus and Ovid, Virgil and Horace, were formed, although they were fostered by his protection and adorned his court. Eloquence indeed had perished with its immortal Tully, and with him also the philosophy and half the literature of Rome. It is a just remark of a cotemporary genius, that the perfect age of Roman literature was that of Cicero himself, comprehending those of preceding times whom he might have seen, and the successors who might have seen him. The cultivation of the Arts thus succeeded that of letters, and the architecture, sculpture, and painting of Rome, were the offspring of Augustus and the patriotic efforts of Agrippa, to whose private influence and munificence we owe the repair of what existed before, and the most splendid of the new monuments which were produced.

But Rome again slumbered under succeeding tyrants, and her golden period was reserved for later and brighter times-for the end of the first and the second century of the Christian era, when her empire included the fairest portion of the civilized world. Then indeed her unnumbered nations, surrounding the Mediterranean, embarked on its peaceful seas to exchange the varied productions of every climate in an unbounded commerce, of which Rome was the great emporium. Then arose Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian the greatest of princes: to the first of these we owe the vast Coliseum, and to the second, the lofty pillar inscribed with his conquests, and the Istrian bridge; but the last, possessing himself an exquisite taste, resigned the objects of ambition, and devoted his life to traverse his mighty empire, not with the march of armies, but encircled by the graceful Arts, whose gifts he dispensed to every province. Then, throughout his wide domain, no portion was left without some useful monument of his genius; the cities he supplied with aqueducts or embellished with temples, he restrained the sea by moles, and secured the ports with watchtowers-in one city he erected a forum, in another an amphitheatre or column. He transplanted the fruits of the earth, encouraged agriculture, constructed roads, and, with a genius universal in the arts, established and conducted at once the most useful manufactures, and the most exquisite productions in sculpture and painting.

When, in the mighty turn of human affairs, Rome became despoiled of her arts, her genius was depictured as sitting on her ruins-the wide arena strewed with the wrecks of her greatness, like the solitude of Palmyra— her colossal amphitheatre, her columns and her arches, the pillars of her temples and her fractured aqueducts, rising like islands from the waste-and her vast population shrunk into a corner. To trace her through the awful period of her decline, would be as little profitable as pleasing; and to those who have dwelt on the arts in their magnificence and beauty, it would be no better than the sad task of an historian who records the ruin of his country. I might indeed prolong the story of ancient art, by describing the gradual inroads of eastern luxury, in corrupting the purer taste of antiquity-the brutal destruction which ensued, from long ages of fluctuating tyranny and barbarian invasion—the rude familiarity with which the statues of the gods and the spoils of their temples, were borne away to adorn the palaces of hostile monarchs-and the combined influences of neglect and war, of fortune and time. But in so doing I should add neither novelty nor instruction to my subject, and I shall leave the ruins of antiquity to slumber through the long night of Gothic darkness, until the gleams of returning science were seen again to dawn.

But while the Arts thus lay hid amid the desolation of their accustomed resorts, they revived in a region and

form in which they had not been expected. After a deluge of barbarism from the north, as if that could not sufficiently extinguish the intellectual attainments of man, a storm arose at once opposite and conflicting, and the savages of Arabia poured forth their exterminating fury, with effects no less fatal than those of the forests of Scythia. With what unholy fanaticism they prostrated the library of Alexandria, then the universal storehouse of letters, every succeeding age has felt; and when its flames were extinguished, man found himself in a new and utter scene of darkness, through which he had to grope, without the thread that connected him with his former enjoyments. But in traversing the regions where the Arts were yet alive, or the ruins of them so fresh as still to awaken recollection, the ferocious bosoms of the conquerors sighed over the cities of Cyrene and Carthage -the intermingled works of Tyrian and Egyptian, Grecian and Roman taste; and when at last the dark horde settled in Spain, a province still adorned with Roman magnificence, they bowed to the superiority of its charms. There commerce, arts and manufactures, delicious fruits, climates of softness, and hills of eternal bloom, gave a new cast to the human mind, and a long race of wise and beneficent princes established a kingdom, whose grandeur, magnificence and happiness, might put to shame the surrounding barbarism of Christian nations -and the relics of whose splendour still throw a charm