NEPI.

Oh whither art thou fled, Saturnian age?
Roll round again, majestic years!

To break the sceptre of tyrannic rage,

From Woe's wan cheek to wipe the bitter tears.

Ye years, again roll round!

Hark, from afar what desolating sound,

While echoes load the sighing gales,

With dire presage the throbbing heart assails!

BEATTIE.

THE romantic little town of Nepi challenges the respect of the traveller, more for its rank in the melancholy pages of early ecclesiastical history than for any thing remarkable in its antiquarian remains. Its castle is a picturesque object, but not historically interesting. The cathedral, however, is one of the most ancient churches in Europe, and an inscription on one of its entrances purports that it was erected in the middle of the second century. It may perhaps be reasonably doubted whether the church in its present form arose at that period, but there appears little reason for doubting the general assertion of the inscription respecting the early foundation of a religious edifice on this spot, and at a time when the ground was still reeking with the blood of lately slaughtered martyrs. If, according to the inscription, the church

was built in the year 150, and numbers of the townspeople fell either shortly before or immediately after that event, we may suppose the martyrdoms to have taken place in one of those casual and local risings against the Christians with which even the reign of the virtuous and almost Christian Antoninus Pius was unfortunately stained. Supposing this to be the case, the sylvan and varied scenery about Nepi may be regarded with a degree of interest certainly not inferior to that inspired by the annals of Rome and its neighbouring states, when struggling for their existence as a people, but under circumstances far less untoward than those of the early Christians. All the sympathies of our nature awake at the recital of sufferings borne long and patiently in the defence of elevated principles, and it is natural that they should be felt with double force when the people for whom they are awakened are very far inferior in strength and numbers to those with whom they contend, and when for some slight sacrifice of truth or virtue they might at once purchase an exemption from persecution and its consequent miseries. It was soon after the time specified by the inscription on the door of the cathedral at Nepi that the Christians had to endure several of the fiercest attacks that ever desolated the infant church. The reign of Marcus Antoninus deluged both the east and the west with Christian blood; and, from the enormities perpetrated in the provinces at some distance from Rome, it is not difficult to estimate the sufferings which must have been endured by that portion of the persecuted people who resided within the very view of