After founding the Church of St. John Lateran, the zeal of Constantine led him to build another and greater one over the tomb of St. Peter. For this the tomb itself served as a nucleus, and Constantine would have no hands but his own dig the beginning of the foundations. “Laying aside the chlamys” (the mantle on which were embroidered the insignia of his rank) “he opened the earth for the construction of the Basilica. Then he carried away on his own shoulders twelve basketfuls of earth, in honour of the twelve Apostles.” The work thus inaugurated was continued under his direction. The body of the blessed Apostle was at this time brought back from the Catacombs to its original resting-place with great glory, and encased in a magnificent silver coffin which in its turn was placed inside a sarcophagus of gilt bronze. Constantine forbade any but the priests to touch the sarcophagus, under pain of severe punishment. At one point on the way, the bearers seemed to be wavering a little, and a common workman, forgetting the Emperor’s orders, stretched out his hand to steady it. There was no need for Constantine to punish him, for the poor fellow’s hand shrivelled up at the contact, only to be restored after earnest prayers for forgiveness of this irreverence. The incident may be legendary, but it reminds me of a later and more authentic one connected with the obelisk which stands in the centre of the Piazza of St. Peter’s. This huge monolith of red granite was brought by Caligula from Heliopolis—the scene of General Kléber’s victory and violent death on the 14th of June, 1800, while Marengo was being fought and won. Its arrival caused great excitement in the imperial city and crowds went out to see it as it lay at Ostia in a ship built on purpose to carry it and, as Pliny informs us, “almost as long as the left side of the port of Ostia.” Unlike most of the Egyptian obelisks, it bears no inscriptions of any kind on its polished sides. It first stood in the Circus of Nero, on ground now covered by the Sacristy of St. Peter’s, and it was only under Sixtus V, in 1586, that it was placed in its present position. Its enormous size and weight (about three hundred and twenty tons) made the moving and erection a labour of the greatest difficulty. The work was superintended by Fontana, the eminent architect, who employed eight hundred men and one hundred and fifty horses to drag it the short distance to the centre of the Piazza. Then came the raising and placing on the pedestal prepared for it, a task so delicate and anxious that Sixtus forbade any one, under pain of death, to utter a single word during the process. Slowly and unwillingly the huge thing submitted to be raised from the ground, but, before it had reached the perpendicular, that happened which the architect had not foreseen—the enormous cables began to stretch. The strain dragged on them so fearfully that in a few minutes they must have parted—and