The catacombs proper, to which entrance may be had from the Basilica of St. Sebastian, are of little importance in themselves, and have lost, by frequent alteration and by the erection of works of masonry for their support, much that was characteristic of their original construction.  During a long period, while most of the other subterranean cemeteries were abandoned, this remained open, and was visited by numerous pilgrims.  It led visitors to the church, and the guardians of the church found it for their interest to keep it in good repair.  Thus, though its value as one of the early burial-places of the Christians was diminished, another interest attached to it through the character of some of those visitors who were accustomed to frequent its dark paths.  Saint Bridget found some of that wild mixture of materialism and mysticism, (a not uncommon mingling,) which passes under the name of her Revelations, in the solitude of these streets of the dead.  Here St. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome, the wise and liberal founder of the Oratorians, the still beloved saint of the Romans, was accustomed to spend whole nights in prayer and meditation.  Demons, say his biographers, and evil spirits assailed him on his way, trying to terrify him and turn him back; but he overcame them all.  Year after year he kept up this practice, and gained strength, in the solitude and darkness, and in the presence of the dead, to resist fiercer demons than any that had power to attack him from without.  And it is related, that, when St. Charles Borromeo, his friend, the narrow, but pure-minded reformer of the Church, came to Rome, from time to time, he, too, used to go at night to this cemetery, and watch through the long hours in penitence and prayer.  Such associations as these give interest to the cemetery of St. Sebastian’s Church.

The preeminence which the Appian Way, regina viarum, held among the great streets leading from Rome,—­not only as the road to the South and to the fairest provinces, but also because it was bordered along its course by the monumental tombs of the greatest Roman families,—­was retained by it, as we have seen, as the street on which lay the chief Christian cemeteries.  The tombs of the Horatii, the Metelli, the Scipios, were succeeded by the graves of a new, less famous, but not less noble race of heroes.  On the edge of the height that rises just beyond the Church of St. Sebastian stand the familiar and beautiful ruins of the tomb of Cecilia Metella.  Of her who was buried in this splendid mausoleum nothing is known but what the three lines of the inscription still remaining on it tell us,—­

CAECILIAE Q. CRETICI F. METELLAE CRASSI.

She was the daughter of Quintus, surnamed the Cretan, and the wife of Crassus.  But her tomb overlooks the ground beneath which, in a narrow grave, was buried a more glorious Cecilia.[C] The contrast between the ostentation and the pride of the tombs of the heathen Romans, and the poor graves, hollowed out in the rock, of the Christians, is full of impressive suggestions.  The very closeness of their neighborhood to each other brings out with vivid effect the broad gulf of separation that lay between them in association, in affection, and in hopes.