To Antonio Bosio, a native of Malta and an advocate by profession, 152 belongs the honour of first unveiling to the astonished gaze of Europe the wonders of this vast city of the dead. He has well been called the Columbus of this subterranean world. Inspired and sustained by a lofty enthusiasm, he spent six and thirty years groping among those gloomy corridors, deciphering the half-effaced inscriptions, and making drawings of the remains of early Christian art. So habituated did he become to this troglodytic existence that the Cimmerian gloom of the Catacombs was more grateful to his eyes than the light of day, which dazzled and almost blinded him. His labours were prodigious, and often both severe and perilous. He had frequently to force a passage with his own hands through the accumulated rubbish of centuries, and was constantly in danger, in the zeal of exploration, of being lost in the windings of the galleries, from which danger he had some narrow escapes. In his great work he describes himself as rushing along with breathless haste, the desire with which he burned adding wings to his weary feet. Again he is creeping serpent-wise through the low and crumbling passages, consoling himself for the difficulty and discomfort by the thought that this lowly attitude befitted the humble and reverent spirit in which a place consecrated by such memories ought to be approached. But he was rewarded for all his toil by the discovery of “pictures bright with the colours of yesterday, and characters still sharp and angular from the primeval graving tool.” The elder D’Israeli has cited Bosio as an illustrious example of the enthusiasm of genius. “Taking with him a hermit’s meal for the week,” he remarks, “this new Pliny often descended into the bowels of the earth by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and ruins till some tomb 153 broke forth or some inscription became legible, tracing the mouldering sculpture and catching the fading picture. Thrown back into the primitive ages of Christianity amidst 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.”[261]