NEWS AND VIEWS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10972, 28 January 1899, Page 6 (Supplement)

NEWS AND VIEWS.

AVE, ROMA IMMORTALIS.

Ukdkb this title (" Hail, Immortal Rome") Mr. Marion Crawford has poured out his love and admiration for the city of Rome, whose history for a thousand years was the history of the world. There is much fitness in a look on Rome by Mr. Crawford. He has lived so much in Italy, he has made such minute studies of Italian history, both for its own sake and for use in his novels, and he comes to Rome so fully informed concerning his subject, and so thoroughly impregnated with its grandeur and overwhelming influence upon the world, that he feels its majesty and splendour, and is able to transfer the impression to his readers. His description of the city in the times of the early repubic, when Roman virtue and endurance were at their highest, indicates that it was fai from being a grand place, merely a plain town of ugly little brown houses, likely to be viewed with contempt by the visitors from the spendkl and artistic capitals of Greece. Yet it was already founding the greatness whose name is ill magical . Mr. Crawford traces the city through its period of classical grandeur tc its temporal downfall and through its long degradation in the Middle Ages. Then ha gives us a picture of Rome at its lowest in the following contrast, which is not without pathos: "Imagine it at its greatestr-a capital inhabited by more than two millions of souls, filling all that is left to be seen within and without the walls, and half the Campagna besides, spreading out in a vast disc of seething life, from the central Golden Milestone at the cornel of the temple of Saturn god of remote ages and of earth's dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid mads, where to the right and left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from Rome to (Jstia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to Th-oli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere business of supply, to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great harbour, with its thousand vessels—and some of those that brought grain from Egypt were 400 ft long; remember its vast granaries and store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola. Sacra as a lovely garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an Imperial palace and park; reckon up roughly what all that meant of life, of purer, of incalculable wealth. Marc Antony squandered in his short lifetime eight hundred millions of pounds sterlingfour thousand millions of dollars. Guess, if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast citv.

"Then let 1200 years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of Rienzi. Some 20,000 souls, the remnant and the onebviidredth part of the 2.000,000, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the strongest men have fortified bits here and there. 'Die walls of Aureiian, broken and warworn, and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast, struggling, heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern, dark towel's of Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange, small churches, built of odds and ends and remnant* not too heavy for a few workmen to move; broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to drink the muddy water of the Tiber, because not a single channel remained whole to feed a single fountain from the distant springs that had once filled baths for 60,000 people every day. And around about all, the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by feverstricken peasants to yield the little grain tha'j so few men could need "

Mi. Crawford is a lover of Italy and Rome, and has confidence in their vitality. It is a curious but undoubted fact that it is the oldest of the Latin nations which has the most physical vigour; the French have ceased to increase, the Spanish are certainly in decay, but the Italians are there, hardy, temperate, prolific, and rapidly increasing in numbers. These are facts over and beyond government. The greatness of a nation is founded on primitive physical vigour; none ever existed without it, and the Italians have found it again. The nations that were great in Rome's time have passed for ever; the old Greeks are dead beyond resurrection; nobody dreams of a new Macedonian empire; ancient Carthage is buried under the ashes, and the kingdom of the Ptolemies is a dependency of England; but we have again a reunited Italy and a strong Italian race. But we cannot agree with Mr. Crawford when he thinks that Rome will again rule tho world. Never— least, not in a temporal way. Rome has had her day. She lias heaped up great deeds and memories that will endure, but that new Rome and Italy will subdue the powerful nations now in existence is incredible. The cool mind cannot conceive it.