254 KEW : 1879-1885 



should not know which I was at ! Each has a stadium and 

 its Palaestra, and a theatre and a library and so forth, and 

 in both cases these are separated by gigantic mounds of 

 ruins that have no distinguishing character of any sort. 



I think however that I can picture Eome as it was in the 

 Republic better than before — a city of no imposing character 

 as a whole, formed of a vast multitude of low buildings with 

 slanting roofs belonging to the lower classes, with here and 

 there a magnificent vendua, and scattered public buildings of 

 still greater magnificence contrasting strangely with the hovels 

 around. In fact a sort of Benares with architecture of a 

 very different type. Judging from the frescoes, the ordinary 

 peasant's and townsman's house must have been very like 

 what we see now in and around Eome, and the house with 

 the atrium, peristyle, impluvium and so forth must have 

 been confined to the wealthy and few and far between. 

 Again it appears to me that the vast extent of the public 

 buildings and private ones of the upper classes, the prodigious 

 amount of material put into these, the vast amount of wTOught 

 stones of incredible magnitude and hardness, and the lavish 

 decoration of mosaics that required much time or many hands 

 to produce them, all bespeak a prodigious disproportion of 

 a very poor working class whose labor was forced or paid 

 for by the smallest coin and coarsest food. The civilisation 

 that produced such buildings as we have in Italy, Egypt and 

 Assyria had I suppose this element in common of a prodigality 

 of forced or very cheap labor. These stupendous buildings 

 are the Stonehenge and the Monoliths of a barbarous people 

 in so far as means employed are concerned. It is true that 

 St. Peter's is as big a thing as any that the ancient Romans 

 produced, but it does not represent the * brute strength ' 

 that the Colosseum does, as an expenditure of human labor 

 or muscular power. 



This last sage remark turns me to the Churches, an endless 

 theme. The first thing that must strike any traveller from 

 the North is the difference in the style of architecture from 

 the Northern Gothic, and the fact that one is adapted to 

 pictorial decoration, the other not, and this leads to the 

 enquiry how it was that architecture and painting, being 

 sister arts, should be so utterly divorced in the North ! Of 

 the Churches here the grandest in my view are the S. Maria 



