The Baths of Agrippa, of Nero, of Vespasian and Titus had already filled Rome with Therme when Caracalla thought to outdo all his predecessors by building in the Appian Way the immense Baths whose ruins we now see. A mile in circumference, this enormous Bath was open at certain times for the free use of every citizen, whether Patrician or Plebeian, and could accommodate some sixteen hundred persons at one time. The domes-the dome of the Laconian or hot-air bath, for instance-were covered with mosaics, and the walls were lined with precious marbles from Egypt and Numidia. and fittings generally were of silver or bronze, while in the various halls and porticoes stood the most celebrated statues of the City-the Farnese Bull, the Venus of the Capitol, the Venus Callipyge, the Hercules and the Flora of Naples, the Dionysus of the British Museum. Even the pipes and taps "Let us follow," says Lanciani in his Ancient Rome, "let us follow one of those elegant youths into one of the great Therma. He is welcomed on his entrance by the ostiarius, or porter, a tall, majestic fellow with a sword at his side, and by the capsarius, or wardrobe-keeper, who takes charge of his wraps. Then follows a general salutation and kissing of friends, exchange on the last topic or scandals of the day; reading of the newspapers or acta diurna. The visitor then selects the kind of bath which may suit his particular case-cold, tepid, warm, shower, or perspiration bath. The bath over, the real business begins, as for example taking a constitutional up and down the beautiful grounds, indulging in athletic sports or simple gymnastics to restore circulation and to prepare himself for the delights of the table. The luxurious meal finished, the gigantic club-house could supply him with every kind of amusement; libraries, concerts, literary entertainments, reading of the latest poems or novels, popular shows, conversation with the noblest and most beautiful women. Very often a second bath was taken to prepare for the evening meal. All this could be done by three or four thousand persons at the same time without confusion or delay, because of the great number of servants and slaves attached to the establishment." Returning perhaps from the Campagna towards evening along the Appian Way and coming suddenly upon those enormous ruins smouldering in red and purple and gold in the sunset, one understands, perhaps for the first time, one of the secrets of Rome, her contempt of smallness, of perfection, of mere detail, the delicate proportion of the Greek artist, in which every stone was of importance and in place for a special need and purpose of beauty. As it was in antiquity, so it is to-day. She is still the universal expression of the world. The Baths of Caracalla, the Colosseum, the Temples we know so well, will not bear comparison for a moment with any Greek work even of a poor period, and if in like manner we may compare things equally different in intention, we find the same failure in beauty in a sort of unity and completeness when we enter S. Peter's, for instance, or S. Giovanni in Laterano and remember Amiens or Chartres. But in the midst of our disappointment we seem to understand. Here are space and light, two universal things, necessary too for a vast multitude, and Rome has always believed them the two most splendid and majestic things in the world. Certainly these enormous Thermæ, now so bare and almost, as one may think, without the sentiment of ruins, make even to the least sensitive, the most superficial among us, that universal appeal which is the secret of Rome. They are like the debris of a city beside which London in ruins would be just a brick-field, a mean desolation. Even now, when we have stripped them naked, when science has numbered the very bricks and forbidden the flowers, they seem to me in the twilight perhaps the most wonderful thing in the world. What we have spoiled for the sake of fools! A traveller in the first years of the Nineteenth Century saw, or might have seen, so much more than we may see. "I passed," writes such an one," through a long succession of immense hills, open to the sky, whose pavements of costly marbles and rich mosaics, long since torn away, have been supplied by the soft green turf that forms a carpet more in unison with their deserted state. The wind, sighing through the branches of the aged trees that have taken root in them without rivalling their loftiness, was the only sound we heard; and great birds bursting through the thick ivy of the broken wall far above us were the only living things we saw." Well, one might think that a place so lonely, so deserted, might have been left untouched in the beauty that time had bestowed upon it. It was the Italian Government, we learn, that destroyed the evergreens, and the flowers, men even being "let down by ropes to tear out any stray plant which found a resting-place in the sides of the walls." Were they seeking for the eternal life of the City, that secret continuity, which is insatiable and inexhaustible? If it be so, they need not have destroyed a single flower to find it. Yet you might think it the last place in which to seek so illusive a thing. Ah! but the eternity of Rome manifests itself everywhere, everywhere if you can but see. "This Poem," says Shelley in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound," was chiefly written. upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowery glades and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air." Did he remember Horace? Did he remember that it was in the Baths that the poets were wont to recite and try their verses ? "In medio qui Scripta foro recitent sunt multi quique lavantes : "Many recite their writings in the midst of the Forum or in the Bath; they say the voice sounds sweetly in the enclosed place." No, for sure he was unconscious, being a part of that eternity which in some sort he uttered and there made manifest. ROMAN AQUEDUCTS AND BRIDGES JAMES FERGUSSON ERHAPS the most satisfactory works of the Romans PERHA are those which we consider as belonging to civil engineering rather than to architecture. The distinction, however, was not known in those earlier days. The Romans set about works of this class with a purpose-like earnestness that always ensures success and executed them on a scale which leaves nothing to be desired; while at the same time they entirely avoided that vulgarity which their want of refinement allowed almost inevitably to appear in more delicate or more ornate buildings. Their engineering works also were free from that degree of incompleteness which is inseparable from the state of transition in which their architecture was during the whole period of the Empire. It is owing to these causes that the substructions of the Appian Way strike every beholder with admiration and astonishment; and nothing impresses the traveller more on visiting the once imperial city than the long lines of aqueducts that are seen everywhere stretching across the now deserted plain of the Campagna. It is true that they are mere lines of brick arches, devoid of ornament and of every attempt at architecture properly so called; but they are so well adapted to the purpose for which they were |