[324] Of especial interest to English-speaking visitors to this shrine of departed greatness will be three urns containing the ashes of “James III.,” “Charles III.,” and “Henry IX.,” as they are designated, the last princes of the unfortunate house of Stewart. The third of these, Henry Benedict Maria Clement, second son of James the Pretender, took orders at Rome, was advanced to the purple, and during the life-time of his brother, Charles Edward, was known as Cardinal York. On the death of his brother he assumed the regal style of Henry IX., King of England. The usurpation of Bonaparte caused his flight to Venice, where, aged and infirm, the descendant of a line of kings sank into absolute poverty. His successful rival for the British throne, George III., learning his deplorable situation, generously settled on him an annuity of £4,000, which he enjoyed till his death in 1807, at the age of eighty-two. With the worn old man, dying upon a foreign shore, passed away the last survivor of the ill-starred dynasty which has contributed through successive generations so many tragic and romantic episodes to the drama of history. BOOK SECOND. 203 THE ART AND SYMBOLISM OF THE CATACOMBS. CHAPTER I. EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. The conditions under which Christian art was cultivated in the early centuries were eminently unfavourable to its highest development. It was not, like pagan art, the æsthetic exponent of a dominant religion, enjoying the patronage of the great and the wealthy, adorning the numerous temples of the gods and the palaces and banquet chambers of the emperors and senators, commemorating the virtues of patriots and heroes, and bodying forth the conceptions of poets and seers. There was no place in the Christian system for such representations as the glorious sun-god, Apollo, or the lovely Aphrodite, or the sublime majesty of Jove, which are still the unapproached _chefs d’oeuvre_ of the sculptor’s skill. The beautiful myths of Homer and Hesiod were regarded with abhorrence, and the Christians were expressly forbidden to make any representation of the supreme object of their worship, a prohibition which in the early and purer days of Christianity they never transgressed.