iello
began--is memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest
proclamations to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing
else, unless it be its waxen and bejeweled Saint in a glass case, with
two odd hands; or the enormous number of beggars who are constantly
rapping their chins there, like a battery of castanets. The cathedral
with the beautiful door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite
that once ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred
blood of San Gennaro or Januarius, which is preserved in two phials in a
silver tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a year, to the
great admiration of the people. At the same moment, the stone (distant
some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red. It
is said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes,
when these miracles occur.

The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient
catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to be
buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal
Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals. Two of these old
specters totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of
death--as unconcerned as if they were immortal. They were used as
burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit
full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great
mortality occasioned by a plague. In the rest, there is nothing but
dust. They consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths,
hewn out of the rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are
unexpected glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks
as ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark
vaults; as if it, too, were dead and buried.

The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and
Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five
pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and are
unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great
distance from it, tho yet unfinished, has already many graves among its
shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected
elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but
the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius,
separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and sa