Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of characteristics 'like its own.

There was a confusion of black and hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or a broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace.

Many of the houses, indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed still a squalid kind of grandeur.

Dirt was everywhere, strewing the narrow streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices, from the foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and looked out of the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the children that Seemed to be engendered out of it.

Their father was the sun, and their mother--a heap of Roman mud.
It is a question of speculative interest, whether the ancient Romans were as unclean a people as we everywhere find those who have succeeded them.