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and perceive that he who wrote them has entered where no commentator could conduct him into the solemn pathos of Virgil's Musaeum ante omnis ; where the singer whose very existence upon earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.
It happens singularly enough, that a curious old work, Aldrorandus, Musaeum Metallicum, Bologna, 1613, contains drawings of a knife and wooden mask ornamented with mosaic-work of stone, made just in the came way as those described above, and only differing from them in the design. What became of them I cannot tell.
I considered the trophy of Marius as a very curious piece of sculpture, and admired the two sphinxes at the bottom of the stairs leading to this Piazza, as the only good specimens of design I have ever seen from Aegypt: for the two idols of that country, which stand in the ground floor of the Musaeum of the Capitol, and indeed all the Aegyptian statues in the Camera Aegyptiaca of this very building, are such monstrous misrepresentations of nature, that they never could have obtained a place among the statues of Rome, except as curiosities of foreign superstition, or on account of the materials, as they are generally of basaltes, porphyry, or oriental granite.
There is such a profusion of curiosities in this celebrated musaeum; statues, busts, pictures, medals, tables inlaid in the way of marquetry, cabinets adorned with precious stones, jewels of all sorts, mathematical instruments, antient arms and military machines, that the imagination is bewildered, and a stranger of a visionary turn, would be apt to fancy himself in a palace of the fairies, raised and adorned by the power of inchantment.
The pinacotheca of this building was a complete musaeum of all the curiosities of art and nature; and there were public schools for all the sciences. If I may judge by my eye, however, the thermae Antonianae built by Caracalla, were still more extensive and magnificent; they contained cells sufficient for two thousand three hundred persons to bathe at one time, without being seen by one another.
At the farther end of the court of this Musaeum, fronting the entrance, is a handsome fountain, with the statue of a river-god reclining on his urn; this is no other than the famous Marforio, so called from its having been found in Martis Fore.
I was sorry I had not time to consider the antient plan of Rome, disposed in six classes, on the stair-case of this Musaeum, which was brought hither from a temple that stood in the Forum Boarium, now called Campo vaccine.
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