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It would delight me to lay before you with the distinctness and minuteness of a picture, the whole of this novel, and to me most interesting route; but I must content myself with a slight sketch, and reserve fuller communications to the time when, once more seated with you upon the Coelian, we enjoy the freedom of social converse.

When the stream of people had ceased to flow out, Mayda had the window opened, for the air had become vitiated. Benedetto asked them to raise his head a little. He wanted to see the great pine-tree, with its top bending towards the Coelian Hill. The dark green crown of the pine cleft the stormy sky. He gazed at it a long time.

He was a monk on the Coelian hill when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was then reigning, with whom he became intimate, and with his successor Mauritius.

This palace, however, is yet worthy of being visited. Under the portico of the Villa Negroni are the two fine statues of Sylla and Marius, seated on the sella curulis. In the extensive garden, which is three miles in circuit, some beautiful fresco paintings have been found in the ruins of some of the houses. The Villa Mattei, on the Coelian mount, contains a splendid collection of statues.

The number of citizens was doubled. The Coelian Mount was added to the city, and, in order that it might be more thickly populated, Tullus selected it as a site for his palace, and subsequently took up his abode there.

It was erected by the senate and Roman people, in honour of Constantine, after his victory over Maxentius, and crosses the Appian Way, at the junction of the Coelian and Palatine Hills. Here it stands as the last monument of Roman triumph, or like the December sun of "the world's sole monument."

It was founded in the end of the sixth century as we have seen, and its first Bishop was that St Justus who had come with St Augustine from the monastery of St Andrew on the Coelian Hill in Rome, the monastery we now know by the name of the man who sent them, St Gregory the Great. St Augustine and St Justus were not, however, at first received with enthusiasm in Rochester.

The Fountain of Egeria flows to-day in the hollow of the Coelian Hill as it flowed nigh three thousand years ago, although the muses have fled, and the deities Picus and Faunus, which Numa entrapped in the wood of the Aventine, have gone back to their native skies with Jupiter; and Mammon and Philosophy have exorcised that unseen world which once presented so many beauties and wonders to the imagination of man.

They had in some way incurred the anger of the Emperor Julian, and he sent orders for their despatch in their own house on the Coelian hill. They were accordingly executed in their bath, and were buried in the cellar under their mansion. At once a rush of the devout of Rome took place to the Coelian to invoke the aid of these new martyrs.

His monks inhabited the church and the cloisters of Santa Maria in Dominica, or, as it is more commonly called, in Navicella, from the rudely-sculptured marble monument that stands on the grass before its portal, a remnant of bygone days, to which neither history nor tradition has given a name, but which has itself given one to the picturesque old church that stands on the brow of the Coelian Hill.