It links together the paganism and christianity of Europe: dedicated by Agrippa to all the gods, and by Boniface to all saints, it remained to the true religion what it had been to heathen devotion,—and heathen and christian have for nearly 2000 years worshipped within its sacred walls.

In calling it still perfectly entire, I am perhaps overstepping the strict bounds of accuracy; for although Pope Boniface VII., so early as 607, when it had sustained but little injury from time, obtained the permission of Phoca to dedicate it to the true God, to which act may be attributed its preservation, yet this did not preserve it from future spoliation.

Constantinus II. in 663, removed its tiles of gilded bronze to Constantinople; and Urban VIII., in the seventeenth century, tore away 45,000 pounds of bronze from its portico, which, with its vast columns of granite, still shades the entrance. Its bronze doors still swing upon the ancient hinges; and many of the original columns, of rare and brilliant marbles, still occupy their original positions. But the famous Caryatides have disappeared, as well as the statues of Agrippa and Augustus; and its enrichments of painting and gilded bronze are replaced by the somewhat gaudy trappings of the Romish church. A more recent innovation, and one perhaps equally to be regretted, is the removal of the busts of celebrated men, which, for three centuries after Raphael had chosen the Pantheon for his resting-place, continued the formation of a series of memorials of the greatest names that have illustrated Italy since that period. Madame de Staël made her Corinna bring Lord Nevil to this spot, and one of the most beautiful passages in her delightful work, is that in which she makes the enthusiastic Italian point out the vacant niche she could one day wish her bust to occupy. But Pius VII. deemed the associations connected with such a gallery unsuited to the present destination of the place, and removing to his Protomoteca in the Campidoglio those profane relics, destroyed some of the most delightful souvenirs of the Pantheon.

Another link between the ancient and modern religion of Rome is the little church of SS. Cosimo e Damiano, occupying the site of the temple of Romulus; erected on the spot where the twins were found with the wolf, beneath the shade of the Ficus Ruminalis. In this church, weakly or deformed children are still brought to the Christian priests, or rather to a miraculous image of the Virgin, as they were to the priests of Romulus. Indeed, so gently did the Romans glide at last from one religion to the other, when persecutions on either side had ceased, that many pagan customs found their way into the forms of worship of the Christians, who found it necessary, in order to attract the