elf is that of the common people. But defects of
style and faults of engraving are insufficient to hide the feeling that
underlies them.

Besides this great collection of the Vatican, there is another collection
now being formed in the _loggia_ of the Lateran Palace, in immediate
connection with the Christian Museum. Arranged as the inscriptions will
here be in historic sequence and with careful classification, it will be
chiefly to this collection that the student of Christian antiquity will
hereafter resort. It in in the charge of the Cavaliere de Rossi, who is
engaged in editing the Christian inscriptions of the first six centuries,
and whose extraordinary learning and marvellous sagacity in deciphering
and determining the slightest remains of ancient stone-cutting give him
unexampled fitness for the work. Of these inscriptions, about eleven
thousand are now known, and of late some forty or fifty have been added
each year to the number previously recorded. But a very small proportion
of the eleven thousand remain _in situ_ in the catacombs, and besides the
great collections of the Vatican and the Lateran, there are many smaller
ones in Rome and in other Italian cities, and many inscriptions originally
found in the subterranean cemeteries are now scattered in the porticos or
on the pavements of churches in Rome, Ravenna, Milan, and elsewhere. From
the first period of the desecration of the catacombs, the engraved tablets
that had closed the graves were almost as much an object of the greed of
pious or superstitious marauders as the more immediate relics of the
saints. Hence came their dispersion through Italy, and hence, too, it has
happened that many very important and interesting inscriptions belonging
to Rome are now found scattered through the Continent.

It has been, indeed, sometimes the custom of the Roman Church to enhance
the value of a gift of relics by adding to it the gift of the inscription
on the grave from which they were taken. A curious instance of this kind,
connected with the making of a very popular saint, occurred not many years
since. In the year 1802 a grave was found in the Cemetery of St.
Priscilla, by which were the remains of a glass vase that had held blood,
the indication of the burial-place of a martyr. The grave was closed by
three tiles, on which were the following words painted in red letters:
LVMENA PAXTE CVMFL. There were also rudely painted on the tiles two
anchors, three darts, a t