letter to his friend, says,

"_Una nox fuit inter urbem maximam et nullum._"

i.e. One night only intervened between a great city and nothing.

There is something awful in this scene, to see on one side of the
stair-case the conflagration well executed; on the other, strong marks
of the very fire which burnt so many ages ago; for there can be no
doubt, but that the Bronze plate then stood in the _Roman Hotel de
Ville_, and was burnt down with it, because it was dug up among the
refuse of the old city on the mountain called _Fourvire_, on the other
side of the river, where the original city was built.--In cutting the
letters on this large plate of Bronze, they have, to gain room, made no
distance between the words, but shewn the division only by a little
touch thus < with the graver; and where a word eroded with a C, or G,
they have put the touch within the concavity of the letter, otherwise it
is admirably well executed.

Upon entering into the long gallery above stairs, you are shewn the late
King and Queen's pictures at full length, surrounded with the heads of
some hundred citizens; and in one corner of the room an ancient altar,
the _Taurabolium_, dug up in 1704, near the same place where
_Claudius's_ harangue was found; it is of common stone, well executed,
about four feet high, and one foot and a half square; on the front of
it is the bull's head, in demi relief, adorned with a garland of corn;
on the right side is the _victimary_ knife[A] of a very singular form;
and on the left the head of a ram, adorned as the bull's; near the point
of the knife are the following words, _cujus factum est_; the top of the
altar is hollowed out into the form of a shallow bason, in which, I