We here see how a foreigner, reading these two inscriptions, with the portraits, and knowing that the Church commemorates the two martyrs on the same day, might easily be led to suppose that they were here deposited together. Finally at the right hand of the tomb stands a truncated column, about three feet high, concave at the top, as before described; and as a confirmation of the use to which we said it might be put, St. Gregory has, in his list of oils sent to the Lombard Queen, “Oleum S. Cornelii,” the oil of St. Cornelius. We see, then, how, during the second period, new ornaments, as well as greater conveniences, were added to the primitively simple forms of the cemeteries. But we must not, on that account, imagine that we are in any danger of mistaking these later embellishments for the productions of the early ages. The difference is so immense that we might as easily blunder by taking a Rubens for a Beato Angelico, as by considering a Byzantine figure to be a production of the two first centuries. We come now to the third period of these holy cemeteries, the sad one of their desolation. When the Lombards, and later the Saracens, began to devastate the neighborhood of Rome, and the catacombs were exposed to desecration, the popes extracted the bodies of the most illustrious martyrs, and placed them in the basilicas of the city. This went on till the eighth or ninth century; when we still read of repairs made in the cemeteries by the sovereign pontiffs. The catacombs ceased to be so much places of devotion; and the churches, which stood over their entrances, were destroyed, or fell to decay. Only those remained which were fortified, and could be defended. Such are the extramural basilicas of St. Paul on the Ostian way, of St. Sebastian on the Appian, St. Laurence on the Tiburtine, or in the Ager Veranus, St. Agnes on the Nomentan road, St. Pancratius on the Aurelian, and, greatest of all, St. Peter’s on the Vatican. The first and last had separate _burghs_ or cities round them; and the traveller can still trace remains of strong walls round some of the others.