pace seem black spotted with white. They are ugly;
and the poverty of these bits of painted stick, incapable of resisting
the effects of the weather, seems sordid in the extreme. In the graves
of this part of the cemetery all are in truth equal. To the left of the
vast cloister-surrounded square which has been mentioned the scene is a
very different one. There, immediately behind the eastern end of the
basilica, the soil rises in a very steep bank to a height greater than
that of the church. To the space on the top of this bank a handsome and
garden-decorated flight of step leads; and there the "Upper Ten" take
their dignified rest, and their dust is perfectly safe from all danger
of being mingled with that of less distinguished mortality. This higher
ground is called the _Pincetto_--as who should say the "Little
Pincian"--a name adapted from that of the celebrated promenade of the
gay and fortunate in life, with a suggestion of meaning so satirical
that it might seem to have been given to the "fashionable" quarter of
the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the
undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of
course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and
some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor,
and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of
numerous weeping willows and other such botanical helps to sentiment.
The great majority of the inscriptions are in Latin, for Pius IX., so
long as his power lasted, absolutely forbade the use of any other
language; which was a measure of very questionable judiciousness, seeing
that a large crop of Latinity by no means creditable to Italian
scholarship has been the result. It would have been better to stick to
good Della-Cruscan Italian, or to have employed some English
school-usher to come here as resident reviser of Roman Latinity.
Inelegant and even ungrammatical inscriptions, however, do not interfere
with the general picturesqueness of the spot, or with its singular
adaptation to show to advantage the remarkable scene enacted there on
the last "Giorno dei Morti."

The cemetery had been visited by great numbers of persons, bringing
chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the
plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and
the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one,
which did not make t