United States or Mongolia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Its height is commonly of five or six foot. Yet sometimes it is of such a tall growth as doth surpass the length of a lance, but that is only when it meeteth with a sweet, easy, warm, wet, and well-soaked soil as is the ground of the territory of Olone, and that of Rasea, near to Preneste in Sabinia and that it want not for rain enough about the season of the fishers' holidays and the estival solstice.

If there were any authority now in the oracles of Jupiter Ammon; of Apollo in Lebadia, Delphos, Delos, Cyrra, Patara, Tegyres, Preneste, Lycia, Colophon, or in the Castalian Fountain; near Antiochia in Syria, between the Branchidians; of Bacchus in Dodona; of Mercury in Phares, near Patras; of Apis in Egypt; of Serapis in Canope; of Faunus in Menalia, and Albunea near Tivoli; of Tiresias in Orchomenus; of Mopsus in Cilicia; of Orpheus in Lesbos, and of Trophonius in Leucadia; I would in that case advise you, and possibly not, to go thither for their judgment concerning the design and enterprise you have in hand.

It is a spot in the Campagna somewhat to the south-west of a line drawn from the city to the base of the Alban Hills; and though the place chosen for the operation of the merca is, as I have said, a hollow, the generality of the immediate neighborhood is somewhat higher than the level of the surrounding plain, and the eye is thus enabled to wander far and wide over the Campagna to the Alban Hills southward; to the peak of Monte Cavo, where the early rays of the sun are just touching with light the old gray walls of the convent on its summit; to the large village of Rocca di Papa on its hillside a little farther to the left; to the town of Grotto Ferrata on the lowest instep of the hill, and more still to the left; and then Frascati, with the heights of Tusculum above it; and thence to that wonderfully beautiful opening in the range of hills where Preneste lies; and beyond that, as we turn the delighted eye slowly round to the eastward, the olive-rich hill of Tivoli, the woods that mark the position of Hadrian's Villa, and the whole range of the Sabine Hills.

At this moment two legates, the Cardinal Bishop of Preneste and the Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, arrived from the pope and strove to mediate between the two sovereigns and to bring about a cessation of hostilities, pointing out to them the scandal and desolation which their rivalry caused in Christendom, the waste of noble lives, the devastation of once happy provinces, and the effusion of innocent blood.