gling, piercing with tridents, agile with slings, hacking with swords, the thousand and one pitiless weapons and manœuvres for gratifying half of mankind at the expense of the other. You fancy you heard the murmur of applause travelling round the ellipse, louder and louder growing? Swelling voices there surely are? Yes; for it is half-past three, and the dark-veiled, long-robed members of the "Misericordia" come wending their doleful way with solemn chanting through the Arch of Titus to celebrate beneath us the devotion of the Via Crucis,-the dolorous journey. They too are armed, but with the cross; they too are gladiators, but against the spirits of darkness. In a world yet far from what it should be, they may gain the crown of martyrdom if they list. Let them go, like Telemachus, into busy arenas, and say that all is not yet right, and I will answer that, like Telemachus, they also shall be stoned. Hush is it not solemn? Their pace is slow, but they are defiling underneath the arches where imperial conquerors have oft been hailed with loud-voiced acclamations. Do they not seem to be singing the very lines of Luigi Biondi ?

"Santa religion! gli aspri costumi
Tu raddolcisti, e fai stille di pianto
Versar dove correan di sangue fiumi."
"Holy religion! thou the harsher ways
Dost sweetly soften, and lamenting tears
Makest to flow where bloody rivers ran.'

It is not much over a hundred years ago that this devotion of the Via Crucis, commemorating the painful journey to Calvary, and now practised in every Roman Catholic country, was instituted within this very enclosure. Leonardo da Porto Maurizio obtained, first the coöperation of some loving people whom his eloquent sermons had attracted to his side, and afterwards the authorisation of the Pope to found a confraternity, whose special piety should be the weekly practice of this new devotion. Benedict XIV. entered heart and soul into the pathetic enterprise; erected, out of his private purse, the little altars attached to the separate stations; and planted in the centre of the once pagan arena the sovereign cross. Seven years later the ground was consecrated, mass was celebrated, and the faithful communicated in crowds within the roofless temple. But numerous rude vicissitudes had awhile held, and then abandoned it, before this satisfactory transformation occurred. Used no longer for the purposes for which it was constructed, it ceased at last even to bear the name of the Flavian Amphitheatre. The Western Empire had fallen; and pilgrims from our own land talked on their return of a still perfect and imposing pile, but they called it the Colosseum. Some over-hasty antiquaries will tell you that it obtained its new appellation from the colossal statue of Nero which once stood in front of the Temple (close at hand) of Venus and Rome. But Nero, and his statue, and golden house, and all, had long gone down to dust and temporary oblivion; and they christened it the Colosseum, because the Flavian

family was scarce known to them, and the classical times had gone, and simple folks called things by names that represented what they looked like. Earthquakes troubled it in the eighth, fires lighted by Guiscard's terrible troopers scorched it in the eleventh, the Frangipani turned it into a fortress in the fourteenth century. First one noble scoundrel took to bay there, then another. When the turbulent Roman aristocracy were at peace with each other for a week or two, they turned to tilt and tourney within it, which ended, however, as Monaldeschi's chronicles tell us, in un gran fracasso,-a terrible shindy. Then they took to pillaging it, and running each other through as they carted away its materials. At last they hit upon the noble expedient of agreeing that it should be the common property of the great houses, so that every one might have a share in the plunder. When these had taken all that they thought worth cartage, the mimes of the Gonfalone came tumbling in, and represented their mystery-plays to whoso would come and gape at them. At last men bought and sold there; turned the place into a market overt, and haggled over a baiocco of succulents. Sixtus V., the great political economist of the papal see, fancied he could do better than that, and bethought him of wool manufactories. Let us thank Benedict XIV. for his interference, and Pius VII. for his timely south-west wall. But mostly let us do full justice to what has been done for the Colosseum by the present Pope, who, whatever political sins be upon his head, will certainly go down to posterity as a most distinguished Pontifex Maximus. His restorations have left it all its grand character of the prince of ruins, but secured it against further decay or renewed desecration. It is but eighteen hundred years old: there is no reason why it should not last eighteen thousand. But its history is written. It can suffer but few more vicissitudes. It will always help to wing the imagination, expand the heart, cultivate the intellect, and humanise the soul. It is the most silent but most instructive of teachers; the largest and most lore-imparting tome of all the monumental records of earth. I who saw it first with wonder in the winter moonlight, and last in the soft glories of an April sundown,-shall I ever recline amid its foliage again?

A Difficulty.

BONNIBELS twain were sitting

Out on a sward in France; One with some homely knitting, One with a court romance.

One as the beach was sunny,

One was as pale as foam;

One like to virgin honey,

One like the virgin comb.

She with the stately story

Eyes had as blue as dawn, Simple to see through for ye, Even as dew on lawn.

She with the worsted busy,

Orbs that, like stars at night, Gazed on, but turn ye dizzyLuminous not, though bright.

Gaily: "For friend or mother,
Never a man I wed

Who, having loved another,
Loveth now me instead."

Gravely: ""Twere risk to marry
Him who ne'er loved before:

Rarely the first birds tarry;

Soon are the first buds o'er."

"Oh! but 'twere horrid, thinking Lips with a right divine, Lately athirst, were drinking

Bliss from a source not mine!"

"Were it not pain like dying,

If that a form caressed,

All through the night were lying

Hushed on a rival's breast?"

Gaily: "Withal, my suitor

Firstly must have-no Past!" Gravely: "And mine-no Future! I must be loved the last!"

Silent again are sitting

Bonnibels twain in France; One with her homely knitting, One with her court romance.

Broken to Harness.

A STORY OF ENGLISH DOMESTIC LIFE.

By EDMUND YATES.

CHAPTER I.

MR. CHURCHILL'S IDEAS ARE MONASTIC.

THE office of the Statesman daily journal was not popular with the neighbours, although its existence unquestionably caused a diminution. of rent in its immediate proximity. It was very difficult to find—which was an immense advantage to those connected with it, as no one had any right there but the affiliated; and strangers burning to express their views, or to resent imaginary imputations cast upon them, had plenty of time to cool down while they wandered about the adjacent lanes in vain quest of their object. If you had business there, and were not thoroughly acquainted with the way, your best plan was to take a sandwich in your pocket, to prepare for an afternoon's campaign, and then to turn to the right out of Fleet Street, down any street leading to the river, and to wander about until you quite unexpectedly came upon your destination. There you found it, a queer, dumpy, black-looking, old building,-like a warehouse that had been sat upon and compressed,-nestling down in a quaint, little, dreary square, surrounded by the halls of Worshipful Companies which had never been heard of save by their own Liverymen, and large churches with an average congregation of nine, standing mildewed and blue-mouldy, with damp voters'-notices peeling off their doors, and green streaks down the stuccoed heads of the angels and cherubim supporting the dripping arch over the porch, in little, dank, reeking churchyards, where the rank grass overtopped the broken tombstones, and stuck nodding out through the dilapidated railing.

The windows were filthy with the stains of a thousand showers; the paint had blistered and peeled off the heavy old door, and round the gaping chasm of the letter-box; and in the daytime the place looked woebegone and deserted. Nobody came there till about two in the afternoon, when three or four quiet-looking gentlemen would drop in one by one, and after remaining an hour or two, depart as they had come. But at night the old house woke up with a roar; its windows blazed with light; its old sides echoed to the creaking throes of a huge steam-engine; its querulous bell was perpetually being tugged; boys in paper caps and smeary faces and shirt-sleeves were perpetually issuing from its portals, and returning, now with fluttering slips of paper, now with bibulous refreshment. Messengers from the Electric Telegraph Companies were there about every half-hour; and cabs that had dashed up with a stout gentleman in spectacles dashed away with a slim gentleman in a white hat, returning with a little man in a red beard, and flying off with the stout gentleman again. Blinds down all round the neighbourhood; porters