interiors of tombs, showing that beautiful and curious opus reticulatum, or reticulated arrangement of bricks or tufa blocks, which is so characteristic of the imperial period, and rows upon rows of neat pigeon-holes in the brickwork, which contained the cinerary urns, all robbed of their treasures, their tear-bottles, and even their bones.  Ruthless popes and princes have done their best during all the intervening ages to destroy the monuments by taking away for their own uses the marble and hewn stone which encased them, leaving behind only the inner core of brick and small stones imbedded in mortar which was never meant to be seen.  Pitying hands have lately endeavoured to atone for this desecration by lifting here and there out of the rubbish heap on which they were thrown some affecting group of family portraits, some choice specimens of delicate architecture, some mutilated panel on which the stern hard features of a Roman senator look out upon you, and placing them in a prominent position to attract attention.  But though they have endeavoured to build up the fragments of the tombs into some semblance of their former appearance, the resuscitation is even more melancholy than was the former ruin.  Their efforts at restoration are only the very graves of graves.  In some places a side path leading off the main road to a tomb has been uncovered, paved with the original lava-blocks as fresh as when the last mourner retired from it, casting “a lingering look behind;” but it leads now only to a shapeless heap of brick, or to the empty site of a monument that has been razed to the very foundations.

One piece of marble sculpture especially arrests the eye, and awakens a chord of feeling in the most callous heart.  It represents one of those Imagines Clipeatae which the ancient Romans were so fond of sculpturing in their temples or upon their tombs; a clam shell or shield with the bust of a man and a woman carved in relief within it, the hand of the one fondly embracing the neck of the other.  Below is a long Latin inscription, telling that this is the tomb of a brother and sister who were devotedly attached to each other.  Who this soror and frater were, there is no record to tell.  All subsidiary details of their lives have been allowed to pass away with the other decorations of the tomb, leaving behind this beautiful expression of household affection in full and lasting relief.  I felt drawn more closely to the distant ages by this little carving than by anything else.  The huge monuments around weighed down my spirit to the earth.  The very effort to secure immortality by the massiveness of these tombs defeated its own object.  They spoke only of dust to dust and ashes to ashes; but that little glimpse into the simple love of simple hearts in the far-off past lifted me above all the decays of the sepulchre.  It assured me that our deepest heart-affections are the helpers of our highest hopes, and the instinctive guarantees of a life to come.  Love creates its own immortality; for “love is love for evermore.”