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It was indeed a lovely and an interesting scene. The amphitheatre, as it now stands, is in excellent preservation; I believe a large sum is annually devoted to the purpose of keeping it so. It is a noble specimen of the gigantic works of the indefatigable Romans. These great Coliseums give one some idea of the immense populations of the cities in those times.
Such furry greenness mantling the rude peelings and healing the fissures of their shattered shells. I no more saw three tortoises. They expanded became transfigured. I seemed to see three Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay. Ye oldest inhabitants of this, or any other isle, said I, pray, give me the freedom of your three-walled towns.
Certainly no stranger could address himself more eagerly to reap what artistic harvest Rome offers, which is reckoned the peculiar produce of Rome among cities under the sun; to all galleries, churches, sistine chapels, ruins, coliseums, and artistic or dilettante shrines he zealously pilgrimed; and had much to say then and afterwards, and with real technical and historical knowledge I believe, about the objects of devotion there.
There were places of amusement, and even places of vice, all distinctly noted: the Chalcidicum or Hall of Justice, the Street of the Tombs, Senate-houses, schools, Forums, and Temples, amphitheatres and coliseums principally, of course, mere ruins, but still showing great beauty of design and finish.
They were borne through an architecture of aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and stonehenges.
You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.
San Diego was like Rome; not the Rome of the time of Romulus, when he marked out the walls with a plough, nor when, later, he bathed in his own blood and that of others and dictated laws to the world: no, San Diego was like the Rome of contemporaneous history, with this difference instead of being a city of marble, monuments and coliseums, it was a city of saualî and cock-pits.
Wherever I have seen these coliseums and open-air theatres, I have always found them most admirably situated for grand and extensive views of the country beyond, and this, I think, must have greatly added to the impressiveness of the performance, and perhaps dignified the cruel and barbarous exhibitions that took place there, as the silent and solemn forest scenery raised the superstitious sacrifices of the ancient Druids to acts of veneration and worship.
The parochial priest of San Diego corresponded to the Pope in the Vatican; the alferez of the Civil Guard to the King of Italy in the Quirinal, but both in the same proportion as the sauali or native wood and the nipa cock-pits corresponded to the monuments of marble and coliseums. And in San Diego, as in Rome, there was continual trouble.
Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them with all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting about for himself?
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