At
any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it.
After twoscore years and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not
say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to
sell me postcards--these are a much later invention of the Enemy--but I
am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and
looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The Colosseum
itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a minion of the wicked
Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and
cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good
deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of
the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the
industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into
workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in
it that hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most
stupendous variety shows that the world has yet witnessed.
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