The great St. Jerome, writing about 1500 years ago, tells us that when he was a schoolboy in Rome, he used to go every Sunday, in company with other boys of his own age and tastes, to visit the tombs of the apostles and martyrs, and to go down into the crypts excavated there in the bowels of the earth. “As you enter,” he says, “you find the walls on either side full of the bodies of the dead, and the whole place is so dark, that one seems almost to realise the fulfilment of those words of the prophet, ‘Let them go down alive into Hades.’ Here and there a little light admitted from above suffices to give a momentary relief to the horror of the darkness; but, as you go forward, you find yourself again plunged into the utter blackness of night, and the words of the poet come unbidden to your mind, ‘The very silence fills the soul with dread.’” Anybody who has frequented the Roman Catacombs will recognise the justice of this description; and if he is as familiar with Virgil and with the Psalms of David as St. Jerome was, he may have used something like the same language to describe his own impressions. But we are writing for those who have never seen the Catacombs at all, and we must therefore enter into more minute particulars. Let us first try to get a general idea of what the Catacombs are. And for this purpose let us transport ourselves in imagination to the city of Rome, and having been led out some two or three miles (more or less) almost on any of the fourteen great consular roads which went forth from the old centre of the world to its most distant provinces, let us go down, either by some modern staircase or through some accidental fissure in the soil, into the bowels of the earth. At the depth of fifteen or twenty feet we shall probably find ourselves landed in a dark narrow gallery, something like what is here represented—a gallery about three feet wide, and perhaps seven or eight feet high, cut out of the living rock, and its walls on either side pierced with a number of horizontal shelves, one above the other, like the shelves of a bookcase. We need hardly be told that each of these shelves once contained a dead body, and had then been shut up by long tiles or slabs of marble, securely fastened by cement, and inscribed perhaps with the name of the deceased or with some Christian emblem. Probably some grave still uninjured may lie within our sight, or we may see bones and ashes in some of the graves that are open. [Illustration: _Gallery with Tombs._]