Although the laws forbid the
worship for which they were built, the hand of reform has as yet not
ventured to doom them to ruin or adapt them to Christian purposes. None
venture to tread their once-crowded colonnades. No priest appears to
give the oracles from their doors; no sacrifices reek upon their naked
altars. Under their roofs, visited only by the light that steals through
their narrow entrances, stand unnoticed, unworshipped, unmoved, the
mighty idols of old Rome. Human emotion, which made them Omnipotence
once, has left them but stone now. The 'Star in the East' has already
dimmed the fearful halo which the devotion of bloodshed once wreathed
round their forms. Forsaken and alone, they stand but as the gloomy
monuments of the greatest delusion ever organised by the ingenuity of
man.
We have now, so to express it, exhibited the frame surrounding the
moving picture, which we shall next attempt to present to the reader by
mixing with the multitude before the palace gates.
This assembly resolved itself into three divisions: that collected
before the palace steps, that loitering about the public baths, and that
reposing in the shade of the groves.
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