And beyond Circeii and its island satellites, we look on to the more distant height, in so many ages the boundary height, best known as a height by the name of Anxur, but known as a boundary by the name of Terracina. When we think how early Rome became the mistress, not only of the height on which we stand and of the kindred heights around it, but of that long coast-line and its protecting heights, we feel why Rome, so early in her history, had to enter on a career of wide-spreading policy, which could never have suggested itself to a power seated at Veii or at Præneste. Rome, on her great river, with her haven at its mouth, with her long line of sea-faring subjects or allies, felt from a very early time the friendship or enmity of the great powers of the sea to be an important matter. She had to dread Etruscan pirates and Phœnician traders; the Greek of Cumæ might perhaps do something more against her than merely shelter her tyrants. We may believe or not in the connexion between the Alban lake and the fall of Veii, but, as we look one way from beside the few stones that are left of Jove's loftiest temple, we understand how needful it was that Juno of Veii should move to Rome. We may or we may not have the camping-ground of Hannibal behind us; but as we look out seawards we believe in the first treaty with Carthage; we go on to wonder how things had turned about, when Duilius and Lutatius could break the Carthaginian power by sea, and when Hannibal could make his way into Italy by land.

Cori.

There was some reason in the remark made by Mr. Creighton in the Academy a little time back, that there must be something "irritating to the Italians of the present date in the point of view which is often adopted by English writers towards Italian history." "Their cities," he said, "which are still instinct with political and social life, are regarded as museums of curiosities, which serve to awaken picturesque reminiscences in the mind of the passing tourist." Mr. Creighton was speaking of Genoa, and at Genoa and in cities like Genoa, what he says may be perfectly true. But there are other Italian cities where the political and social life at least hides itself from the passing tourist, and where the curiosity with which he regards the city is as nothing compared with the curiosity with which the inhabitants of the city seem to regard him. The curiosity is not specially irritating; it is perhaps mixed up with a certain open craving after soldi which nothing short of the very highest civilization can get rid of; but it is quite distinct from the endless touting and wearying which the traveller has to undergo in places which are one degree more advanced, or which, to speak more civilly, have fallen less far back. For it is only civil to believe of cities which were once independent commonwealths, members of the League of the Thirty Cities, and, therefore, doubtless instinct with political life, that they were, at least two or three millenniums back, cleaner than they are now, and filled with inhabitants who had something more to do than their successors seem to have. But the interest which the novelty of the stranger awakens in the minds of the present inhabitants—far keener, it would seem, than the interest which the antiquity of the city awakens in his mind—really does him no harm. The modern Latins or Volscians come and look; they wonder; they follow. If the nature of the country requires that the strangers be set on asses and mules, the curiosity, as is only natural, reaches its height. The asses of the Prisci Latini or of their Volscian neighbours are undoubtedly grave and discreet beasts; even the obstinacy of the mule is a virtue when he knows the way so much better than his foreign rider. But there is something grotesque in the way of going; it is not wonderful if the sight gathers together a crowd, if the travellers find themselves the centre, not exactly of triumph, for they are not drawn in a chariot; not exactly of an ovation, for they do not walk on foot; but of a not ill-humoured procession of gazers, it may even be of admirers.

Something of this kind is likely to be the destiny, at some point at least, of those who wish to carry out the full programme of the right wing of the Latin host of Regillus:

Tusculum they will, perhaps, have made the object of a separate pilgrimage; Aricia belongs to the following of Jupiter and the Alban mount; "Setia's purple vineyards" it may be hard to take into the line of march; but, with a slight change of order, "Velitræ, Cora, Norba," with the later Ninfa thrown in as a substitute for neglected Setia, will form an admirable group, a day's journey, which those who have made it will perhaps, at the end of a day or two, feel sorry that they have not cut into two. Velitræ—hardly changed in the modern Velletri—has itself but little to show beyond one of the very noblest bell-towers of the second Italian period, where the pointed arch creeps in, a visitor which in Italy is better away, but which at least keeps out the vagaries of a yet later time. The lie of the town is good; it stands well on its hill, of no great elevation among its brighter neighbours. Besides the bell-tower, it has little to show in the ecclesiastical line, save only the eccentricity of having its cathedral church placed as if we were in Wales instead of in Italy, at the bottom of the city instead of at the top. One or two ancient houses and modern palaces may claim some attention, but Velletri, truly barren in Roman remains, cannot be said to be fruitful in those of mediæval times. The chief value of the town is as a starting-point—we can hardly call it centre—for Cora, Norba, and several other of its ancient fellows. The view from Velletri is beyond words. We look over the fertile plain, dying away to the right into the Pomptine marshes, and fenced in by the mighty limestone bulwark of the Volscian mountains. To the right of all the height of Anxur's temple looms in the distance; Circeii, with its following of islands, rises nearer and more plainly, almost itself like a great island, reminding the visitor from the West of England of Brean Down and the Holms in the Severn Sea. But the mountains draw the eyes towards them by something more than their bright masses, something more than a light and shade upon their sides. Several of their strong points are crowned with castles and whole towns; and one point so crowned stands out as the centre of all. We see one spur of the mountain, far lower than the heights beyond it, crowned by a little city coming some way down its sides, with a tall tower rising well from the midst when the sunlight catches it. There stands one of the chief objects for which Velletri is the starting-point; there we have to look for—

Watch-towers, perhaps, in the strictest sense, we do not see, and we shall hardly find them when we come nearer; but Cora, Cori, still keeps the mightiest of walls, which it was no wonder that men looked on as too mighty to be the work of such mortals—in Homer's phrase—as we now are, and looked on them as reared by no hands weaker than those of the forgers of Jove's own thunderbolts. With Cori we enter on the examination of a long series of towns, whose main feature is their primæval walls, and among these Cori has the merit of showing us the walls that are the most primæval of all. None of its fellows can show such blocks as the mysterious engineers, whose work men love to call Cyclopean, piled together in the lower town of Cori, just outside what is now the gate of Ninfa. Blocks indeed of equal size we may see elsewhere, but surely none of equal rudeness. They are heaped together as they were hewn or torn away from their place in the natural rock; huge limestone blocks of every size and shape, with the spaces between them filled up with similar stones of their own kind. But the whole range of the wall of Cori is not of this primitive sort. The curious in such matters distinguish five epochs: Cyclopean, Latin, Old Roman, Roman of Sulla's day, and—the leap is a great one—mediæval walls of the time of King Ladislaus; we hardly venture to give an Angevin king of the hither Sicily the full Slavonic shape which marks him as sprung from the other side of Hadria. The stones of the first four—we have already spoken of the first of all—are all polygonal, of distinguishing degrees of regularity of work and degrees of size. The rudest wall, as far as we saw, of all is to be found quite at the bottom; the others may be seen side by side in the great walls of the arx which soar high above all, and which shelter the chief ornament of Cori in quite another department.

According to the nearly invariable rule, the arx of Cora contained a temple, and the temple, as so often happens, has been turned into a church. But the change has been less destructive to Cori than in many other places. The house of St. Peter has been built without damaging the portico of the house of Hercules—the old Latin Herculus was hopelessly confused with the Hêraklês of Greek legend—and still keeps the columns of his portico, both on its front and its sides; keeps his entablature, his pediment, the gate-way of his cella, the inscription which records the work of the local duumvirs, Manlius and Turpilius. But what shall we say to the columns themselves? They profess to be Doric, even to be Greek Doric; but they have bases; they stand as wide apart as Etruscan tradition planted the columns of the Capitoline Jupiter; the shafts themselves, instead of being as massive as Pæstum, are slenderer than Nemea. But sin against rule as it may, the upper temple at Cori is still undoubtedly pretty, to say the least, and it is really all the more interesting because of its sin against rule. Far finer in themselves are the Corinthian columns—such as are left—of the temple of the Greek Twin Brethren lower down the hill; but we can see good Corinthian columns in a great many places; the peculiarities of the Hercules temple are special to Cori. Do they not speak of the Hellenizing mind of the great dictator who made Cora rise again after it had suffered deeply at the hands of his Marian enemies? Stern restorer of what he deemed Rome's ancient ways, but votary and favourite of Hellenic gods, the taste of Sulla might well lead him to some such forms as we see in the object, yet prominent from many points of view, that crowns the height of the citadel of Cora.

But we have not gone through the full tale of the antiquities of this strange little mountain-city. Outside the Ninfa gate, spanning at a vast height the deep gorge which on that side forms the foss of Cori, rises a bridge, of days which we call ancient, but which we are tempted to call modern so near to the Cyclopean wall. Not a few fragments of columns may be marked here and there in the streets. We light too on inscriptions. Besides the duumvirs—one might call them the bailiffs—of the Roman Municipium, whose names are carved on the frieze of Hercules, another commemorates two Praitors; surely these, with their archaic spelling, are the abiding magistrates of the Latin Commonwealth—as Cicero's Milo was dictator of Lanuvium—dependent on Rome, but not fully incorporated in her substance. Then, besides the chief temple, other Pagan buildings and objects have been turned to Christian uses. In the church where St. Peter has supplanted Hercules, an altar, if altar it be, bearing rams with horns and the Gorgon's head, has been hollowed out to make a baptismal font. The church of St. Oliva bears a dedication dating only from the sixteenth century; but it is a lovely cloister of that better kind of Renaissance which was in truth only a falling back on Romanesque. In the church are memorials of earlier times, classical columns used again, fitted some of them with capitals of the very rudest Romanesque, whose fellows may be found in Worcester and at Hildesheim. Altogether Cori is emphatically a place for a visit. But a word of warning must be given. Cori and Norba cannot be combined so as to see both worthily in a single day. Let the traveller either make two distinct outings from Velletri, or let him take his chance of sleeping at Cori; it may not be a worse chance than sleeping at Frosinone, where sleep may be had. Then let him rise up early in the morning and saddle his ass, or, if able-bodied, let him rather make his way on his own feet along the mountain-path to Norba.

Norba.

We will suppose that, the mutual curiosity of natives and strangers having been fully gratified at Cori, the strangers have set out on their way, on mule-back or otherwise. The mountain-track up and down, skirting the lower heights of the Volscian range, opens noble views of the higher mountains inland, of the wide flat below, and of the sea beyond. But these views are perhaps, on the whole, better enjoyed when the traveller has found a firm foothold within "Norba's ancient wall" than while he has personal experience how

Still worse indeed is it when the flinty paths have to be plodded down, and when the weary load needs all his theoretical philosophy to persuade him how thoroughly safe he really is, while the weakness of the flesh surrounds the descent with terrors which he knows to be unreal. At last the ancient wall rises immediately before him; the hill-side, a small height straight above the path, is climbed on his own feet, and he can presently contemplate at his ease both the wall itself and the prospect which it commands. The last part of the ass-track has become so like a lane anywhere else that we are amazed when we reach the other side of the immediate height of Norba, and find how far below lies the plain from which the almost perpendicular cliffs spring to bear up the forsaken city. For at Norba the curiosity will be almost wholly on the side of the stranger; in cannot be returned in kind, as at Cori; a lone shepherd or two may come to look at him; he cannot bring together the least approach to a triumphal procession. For within the wall all is, we cannot say desolate or forsaken, for the crops are there, full and green—"segetes, ubi Norba fuit"—but the ancient circuit is at least empty of all dwelling-places of man. We would fain believe that the space has stood as empty as it now does ever since the people of Norba—less wise, as the event showed, than their neighbours of Cora—embraced the cause of Marius with such desperate zeal that they slew themselves and burned their houses rather than let either themselves or their goods fall into the hands of Sulla. This inference might possibly be rash; for the ancient wall fences in at least one ruin which may be later than the days of the fortunate dictator. But it is clear that Norba, if it recovered from this great single blow, gradually dwindled away, to the profit, first of Norma by its side, which still abides, and of Ninfa, at its foot, which has perished only less utterly than Norba itself.

Cori and Norba are alike cities set on hills, and neither of them has any fear of being hid. But they are set on hills in different senses. Cori occupies the upper part of the sloping hill, and the houses spread down the slope. Norba occupies a large table-land on the edge of the mountains, and its outer wall is carried along the upper rim of a steep and lofty cliff. No dwellings could ever have spread themselves downwards on the side which looks toward the marshes and the sea. But we should hardly have said the outer wall; for the height was so carefully fortified that outlying defences were placed at various points on the side of the cliff wherever the primitive engineers deemed such defences needful. Within the circuit, again, the arx rose on several terraces; its highest point—crowned, we may believe, as usual, by a temple—must have formed a proud object indeed from the vast extent of land and sea which it looks down upon. No other of its ancient neighbours looks down so immediately on the great Pomptine flat as Norba does, as none looks down from so great a height. Cori rather occupies a hill thrown out in front of the mountain; Norba sits on the edge of the mountain itself, though of course at a much lower elevation than the huge masses further inland. The towers and temples of the city must have had a wonderful effect from the lands below; as it is, there is nothing to mark the place but the line of wall itself, which does not always stand out in a very marked way from the cliff. It is then perhaps in some sort well that the later Norma has taken the place of Norba. On the hill of Norba we see that Norma and Norba by no means join one another; there is a gap between them which, while we are on the mountain, might pass for a valley. But as we look from below, the winding outline of the hills puts this gap out of sight, and Norma and Norba become in appearance one whole. Norma looks like a continuation of Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited part, perhaps, as at Syracuse and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold within which the city had again shrunk up. From the points where the eye can take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of the cliff, and the further town of Sermoneta crowning a hill-top far lower than the height of Norba, the whole grouping is wonderful. The view from Norba itself takes in points with which we have become familiar since we first gazed on them from the height of the Latian Jupiter. But we see them in new groupings and new proportions; the islands, prisons for dangerous or discreditable members of the Imperial house, stand out in special prominence in front of the Circæan height—a height so nearly cut off from the mainland that it seems like the greatest of the island group. Nowhere do we better understand what men looked on as a great and strong city in days when they had not yet learned that an element of truer might lurked in what, judged by the standard of Norba, would seem a mere group of molehills by the yellow Tiber.

As the whole city lay on the top of the hill, the space taken in by the walls is necessarily greater than in those towns where the hill stands distinct, the arx alone crowns the top, and where the town walls are placed lower down. The nature of the construction adapts itself to the needs of the different parts of the circuit. The mass of the wall is of polygonal stones, rude, but far less rude than the rudest at Cori. Without being actually laid in regular order, they have a certain tendency to fall into courses as it were of themselves, and it is not always easy to tell how far the roughness of the stone has been from the beginning, and how far it is due to the action of the weather on stones cut perhaps somewhat less carefully than the finer stones at Cori. But the Norban builders could, when it was worth their while, do something more than this. They could, when they had to make a corner, put together squared stones cut with a good deal of exactness, and when it was convenient that a corner should be rounded off, they could do that too with equal skill. This last was done at the greatest gateway looking towards Norma. Here there is no sign of either lintel, arch, or attempt at arch, to span the opening; it would almost seem that the gate itself was simply placed across the opening with nothing over it, much as at Tusculum the gate was hung between two pieces of native rock. That the arch was not known to the first builders of Norba, but that they had reached the stage in which men began as it were to stretch forth their hands towards that great invention, is shown by a ruined building—one of the few things within the wall of Norba which can be called even a ruined building—a little way beyond the arx. Here we have a distinct attempt at a vault for the roof; but it is not the apparent cupola of Mykênê and New Grange, nor the apparent barrel-vault of Tusculum. The building is oblong, and the attempted arches rise on both sides, from the small ones as well as from the longer. The ruined state of the building, whatever it was, most unluckily hinders us from seeing how the four vaults, so to call them, were made to meet in the middle. It must have been a strange problem in construction. Hard by is the other building at which we have already hinted as being of later date. It has real arches and masonry, like that which at Cori is attributed to Sulla's time. But it may as well come before the overthrow of Norba in his day as after it.

From primæval and forsaken Norba we go down the hill-side, learning as we go how high Norba stands, to hardly less forsaken, though only mediæval, Ninfa. Ninfa, unlike Norba, has a few inhabitants; there is a house and a mill, if not within the fortified enclosure, at least just outside it, and, if the enclosure itself contains no actual dwelling-places of man, it contains abundance of buildings which have once been so. One can hardly fancy a greater contrast than that which strikes us between the stern primæval wall of Norba, fencing in the thick-standing corn, and the wall of Ninfa, with its towers, its varied and picturesque outline, fencing in a crowd of houses, churches, and buildings of every kind, the oldest of which could not have arisen till a thousand years after Norba became desolate. All are now forsaken, roofless, shattered, forming one of the most singular gatherings of ruins to be seen anywhere, the mummy, as it has been well called, of a dead town. Ninfa was once a place of some consequence, which played its part in local history; perhaps the most notable event suggested by its name is that here Alexander III., a Pope who had so much to do with our own history, was consecrated after his famous disputed election. But its position in the deadly flat, close by a stream, led to its ruin; the malaria was too much for it, and Ninfa ceased to be reckoned among the cities of articulate-speaking men. Some freak might restore the greatness of Norba; for there is nothing to hinder men living there if the fancy took them; they cannot live at Ninfa without greater changes than a Marius or a Sulla can work. There is something specially striking in a town, whose remains are so extensive, standing so utterly desolate. There is something Irish in the look of things at Ninfa, as indeed there is in the look of a good many of the ruined mediæval sites which often meet us in this region. It is not merely the fact of their being ruined, though there is something Irish in that; the tall, slender towers, of which there are many both at Ninfa and elsewhere, have a real likeness to many buildings in Ireland. But, though the general look of Ninfa is singularly striking, there is less to be learned from the particular buildings than might have been looked for. They are spread over several centuries, some of the houses reaching even into Renaissance times. The church of most pretension lies without the walls; several within them keep their apses and the paintings on them, but little more. The whole is a wilderness of ruins, strange, impressive, but hardly venerable. As the ruin of a town, the wreck of many buildings crowded close together, fallen Ninfa has little of the solemnity of our own ruined castles and abbeys. As for the elements of wonder and mystery, they dwell in this region on the hill-top, among the mighty masses of stone which the men of an unrecorded age piled together to make Norba.

Segni.

The visitor to Segni will find difficulties in studying the history on the spot second only to those which he finds at Norba. It is quite certain that he will find no books at Norba, save such as he may take with him, which are not likely to be many. It is possible that there may be books at Segni; there may lurk in some odd corner either a hidden scholar with his treasured library, or a bookseller of that class, sometimes to be found in old-fashioned places, who dislikes nothing so much as parting with his books. But, if such there be, they do not force themselves on the eye on one's entrance into Segni. A natural and important question is sure to present itself, and—without wings to fly at once to the libraries of Rome—there is no immediate means of answering it. Is the name of Signia—now by a very slight change Segni—to be found in any of the lists of the Thirty Cities of Latium? The lists are many, and the traveller is not likely to carry them all in his head. He may perhaps be able to repeat the lines in which Macaulay draws the picture of many of them; and, if so, every step that he takes among the Latin cities will make him more fully admire the fitness and force of the points and epithets picked out in each case. But at Segni the Lay of Regillus fails him; he has his quotations for Cora and Norba; he has no quotations for Signia. Still Macaulay's verses are not a full or formal list of the cities; while, if he argues that Signia lies too much in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican land to have belonged to the Latin name, he is met by the fact that "Ferentinum of the rock," yet further on, has its place in them alongside of "Gabia of the pool." He turns to his guide-book—and the guide-book of Gsell-fels, though it sometimes leaves things out, is almost always to be trusted for what it puts in; he there finds only the entry of the alleged Roman colony of the days of the Tarquins, with the remark that the existing walls seem to point to an earlier origin. And again a thought may occur to him, if not at Segni itself, yet in the later course of the journey of which Segni forms a part—Were the people of ancient Signia specially skilful in the making of mosaic pavements? There is a kind of work called opus Signinum, a pattern of black spots on a white ground, of which there is a good deal at Pompeii, and of which the visitor to Segni will most likely see an example a few days later at Anagni. The question is hardly so exciting as the question as to the position of Signia in the days of the Latin League. But it is one which may suggest itself, and it is one which it will be hard to answer with only the resources which are to be had at Segni itself. The visitor to Segni is thus likely to find himself a little uncomfortable as to more than one point in the history of the place where he stands. And he will feel most uncomfortable of all as to the great point of all with regard to its earliest history. Still, he may for the moment comfort himself by thinking that there are those who might be unkind enough to hint that he would still be equally uncertain if he had a hundred quotations on the tip of his tongue, or if he were in a library with thousands of volumes to turn to.

But whether Signia was ever a Thirty-city or not—we may be allowed to follow the local usage of Canterbury, which speaks of "a Six-preacher"—there is no doubt as to its geographical position; there is no doubt as to the grandeur of its remains. In starting from Velletri, with Algidus and its holm-oaks and its memories of Æquian encampments on our left hand, on the right we turn the corner of the Volscian mountains, and the railway carries us along the valley between them and their Hernican rivals. We reach the station of Segni; we mark more than one town perched on the opposite heights; we have close by us, in the low ground—reminding us of Ninfa on a smaller scale—the walls of a forsaken fortress, with a shattered tower of wonderful height and slenderness; but the walls of Signia still keep themselves hidden among the mountains. It is not from the side of Velletri, but, as we afterwards learn, from the side of Anagni, that Segni on its mountain height, and its satellite of Gavignano, perched on a smaller detached hill in front, form striking features in the landscape.

Segni belongs to the same class of hill-fortress as Norba, not the same class as Cori. It occupies, not the top of a conical hill, but a table-land, if we may apply that name to so narrow a space, on the mountain itself. The distinction is well marked by comparing it with Gavignano just below, which is one of the chief objects in the immediate view from the height of Segni. The difference is just the same as the difference between Norba and Sermoneta, though Gavignano has more the air of being an outpost of Segni than Sermoneta has of being an outpost of Norba. The hill-top which Segni crowns is long and narrow, at some points very narrow indeed, so as to give to the space within the walls nearly the shape of a figure of eight. The space within is neither wholly forsaken, as at Norba, nor all crowded with dwellings, as at Cori. The modern town has withdrawn into one quarter of the old enclosure; but it has not, as in so many other cases, withdrawn into the ancient citadel. The site of the arx of Signia, rising but little above the general level of the hill-top, but placed well so as to command what we may call the isthmus between the two parts of the town, forms no part of the dwelling-place of the modern Signians; but under the name of Passegiata it does form part of their pleasure-ground. The modern town has retreated into the other loop of the figure of eight, that which lies furthest from the traveller as he draws near from Velletri, but to which the course of the road will necessarily take him first. He may enter by a gateway of Roman date, and if he so does his eye will soon be struck by the great number of graceful fragments of mediæval work to be found within the narrow streets of Segni. The town has most likely been for ages too poor to follow the example of its richer neighbours in replacing beauty by ugliness. But he will do better to keep for a while from entering the inhabited part of the town. Let him first make the circuit of the ancient walls. And he can hardly doubt whether to turn to the right hand or to the left. The claims of the left are in this case overwhelming. Long before he has reached the town, he must have seen far away on the hill the most precious of the remains of Signia, the gateway which stands, forsaken but still untouched, beckoning him, as it were, to make his way first of all to the most instructive thing which the primæval city has to show him.

But before he can reach either the Roman or the primæval gate he will have begun to notice the character of the wall. The construction is hardly so rude as the rudest parts of the wall at Cori, but a great deal of it belongs to the same general stage of engineering progress. The huge polygonal stones are heaped together; but one might note perhaps two stages, yet often intermingled—one, where the sides only of the stones are cut so as to fit their neighbours; another, where the outer faces are also smoothed of what is called "rustication" in late Renaissance work. In the first they are not left so utterly in a state of nature as they are at Cori. Their sides have been cut to the shape which was thought best for the work of piling them together. In a later stage, also seen at Cori, the outer sides, those which stand free from the scarped wall, are also cut; but it is not always easy to say how much of the change of the surface is due to art and how much to weather. At Segni the peculiar shape of the enclosure makes it somewhat hard to follow the line of the walls without a ground-plan, and a ground-plan is not to be had at Segni merely by asking for it. But it is plain that, in many parts at least, on the whole side of the hill which lies exposed to the open valley, and on the head of the whole promontory, there was, whenever the ground allowed and required it, a double wall, one on the edge of the hill, the other at some distance down its side. The most famous of the gates of Segni, locally known as Porta Saracenesca, leads from the outside world into the outer enclosure, at a point well chosen for military purposes, close to the edge, and commanding the path by which the traveller will most likely make his way to it. And a mighty gate it is, and one that holds no small place in the history of the art of construction. It is one of those instances which show that their builders were still ignorant of the principle of the arch, but that they were, so to speak, in search of it. They had not yet learned how to make the top of an opening out of stones really so arranged as to stand by mutual support; but they were striving after something beyond the mere horizontal lintel resting on two vertical supports. The builders of Segni had not got so far as those of Veii or Tusculum; as they had no idea of the true principle of the arch, so they had no idea of its form; all they could do was to place two horizontal stones with sides sloping inwards immediately under the lintel. In truth, the construction is still purely that of the lintel, and nothing else; but the form chosen shows a certain vain striving after something different. As such, it is no small lesson which it teaches; and the effect of the great stones thus piled together to form the entrance is striking and solemn. It carries us back from days which on our side of the Alps we deem ancient, but when the arts of construction were as well known as they are now, to days when men were making the first rude attempts towards the greatest of constructive inventions. Attempts of this kind, simply because they are mere attempts, failures and not successes, have a more ancient look than those examples where the builders were fully satisfied with the lintel construction and attempted no other. In point of fact, whatever their relative date, they are later in idea, as showing a desire to innovate on the received form, some instances of which were at last crowned with success.

It is not easy to see how this gate came by its local name. One can understand the process of thought by which the roofing at Tusculum, which has the outward shape of the pointed arch, came to be called arco Gotico; it is harder to guess why the great primæval gate of Segni should be attributed to Saracens. It is far from being the only primæval gateway in the whole circuit. No less than five have been counted between the outer and inner walls, and two more in the part of the enclosure occupied by the modern town, where the two lines of wall coincide. Hard by Porta Saracenesca itself is a small sally-port; of the others, the larger ones, like Porta Saracenesca itself, stand at right angles to the wall. Some of them at least show the same strivings after the arch as their greater neighbour. The nature of the ground forbids the arx from reaching any great height above the rest of the city; but its place is easily marked. It contains a singular large cistern of Roman work, and close by is one of those junctions of different ages which always preach to us a living historic lesson. Here is the terrace of a temple wrought with stones of the primitive construction. On this primitive work rise the remains of the cella in Roman masonry, and the Roman wall of the cella is now carried up to form a church. Now, at least the church is of no architectural value, but it is none the less a witness to the greatest of all the changes which the hoary walls of Signia have looked upon.

Landed, then, in Christian Segni, we may, perhaps, remember that one of the greatest of the Popes was born either in the town itself or in its satellite of Gavignano. But which was the actual spot? Our one guide available at the moment seems to doubt between the two. In either case we see, if we do not tread, the place which gave birth to the third and greatest of the Innocents. We find, too, that a Papal palace of Segni was swept away by the Duke of Alva in that strange war which the Catholic King Philip waged, not, of course, against the Vicar of St. Peter, but against the temporal Sovereign of the Roman States.

We are thus, even at Segni, plunged among Papal memories; we look over the valley of the Trerus across to Anagni, and they press upon us with double force. We hasten to the spot where a lesser Pope than Innocent, but still a mighty one, died like a dog after his fox-like entrance and his lion-like reign.

Iter ad Brundisium.

I. Anagni.

He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia. But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and its lesser fellow—the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left—all these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre,—the hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it—Ninfa's more modern wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations, ruined churches, in abundance—all these may be connected with an iter ad Brundisium, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway—we were going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni. Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels, prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the locanda there as "reinlich und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni, Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII., almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met his end, the prisoner—not the last Pope who was fated so to be—of a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the mind. In mediæval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome. Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore did not suffer at the hands of Renaissance Popes as Rome lived to suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos, then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position, and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium, they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades. But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to another, we better understand the political relations of the endless little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies. They must be always doing something to one another in the way either of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.

We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba, the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it, than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space, allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia, and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of earthly men," or as—