We have already seen the contemporary account of the Catacombs by Prudentius, in the fourth century. Jerome also describes their appearance at the same period in words which are almost equally applicable to-day. “When I was a boy, being educated at Rome,” he says, “I used every Sunday, in company with others of my own age and tastes, to visit the sepulchres of the apostles and martyrs, and to go into the crypts dug in the heart of the earth. The walls on either side are lined with bodies of the dead, and so intense is the darkness as to seemingly fulfill the words of the prophet, ‘They go down alive to Hades.’ Here and there is light let in to mitigate the gloom. As we advance the words of the poet are brought to mind: ‘Horror on all sides; the very silence fills the soul with dread.’”[21] It must not be supposed that the features above described are always 37 perfectly exhibited. They are often obscured and obliterated by the lapse of time, and by earthquakes, inundations, and other destructive agencies of nature. The stairways are often broken and interrupted, and the corridors blocked up by the falling in of the roof, where it has been carried too near the surface, or by the crumbling of the walls, and sometimes apparently by design during the age of persecution. The rains of a thousand winters have washed tons of earth down the _luminari_, destroyed the symmetry of the openings, and completely filled the galleries with _débris_. The natural dampness of the situation, and the smoke of the lamps of the early worshipers, or the torches of more recent visitors, and sometimes incrustations of nitre, have impaired or destroyed the beauty of many of the paintings. The hand of the spoiler has in many cases completed the work of devastation. The rifled graves and broken tablets show where piety or superstition has removed the relics of the dead, or where idle curiosity has wantonly mutilated their monuments.