Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, our Imagination is touched by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great people.  The classical author of Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his recollections.  Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippodromes, and public and private edifices, he, as it were, held an interior converse with the manes of those who seemed hovering about the capital of the old world; as if he had been a citizen of ancient Rome travelling in the modern.  So men of genius have roved amid the awful ruins till the ideal presence has fondly built up the city anew, and have become Romans in the Rome of two thousand years past.  POMPONOIUS LETUS, who devoted his life to this study, was constantly seen wandering amidst the vestiges of this “throne of the world.”  There, in many a reverie, as his eye rested on the mutilated arch and the broken column, abstracted and immovable, he dropped tears in the ideal presence of Rome and of the Romans.[A] Another enthusiast of this class was BOSIUS, who sought beneath Rome for another Rome, in those catacombs built by the early Christians for their asylum and their sepulchre.  His work of “Roma Sotteranea” is the production of a subterraneous life, passed in fervent and perilous labours.  Taking with him a hermit’s meal for the week, this new Pliny often descended into the bowels of the earth, by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and ruins till a tomb broke forth, or an inscription became legible.  Accompanied by some friend whom his enthusiasm had inspired with his own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing the mouldering sculpture, and catching the fading picture.  Thrown back into the primitive ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the historian of the Christian catacombs collected the memorials of an age and of a race which were hidden beneath the earth.[B]

[Footnote A:  Shelley caught much of his poetry in wandering among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine Hill; and the impression made by historic ruins on the mind of Byron is powerfully evinced in his “Childe Harold.”—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  A large number of these important memorials have been since removed to the Galleria Lapidaria of the Vatican, and arranged on the walls by Marini.  They are invaluable as mementoes of the early Church at Rome.  Aringhi has also devoted a work to their elucidation.  The Rev. C. Maitland’s “Church in the Catacombs” is an able general summary, clearly displaying their intrinsic historic value—­ED.]