without scruple to the wishes of those who would fain excavate new tombs in desirable sites. Men do not usually destroy to-day the paintings which they executed yesterday; certainly they do not allow the ornamentation which they have just lavished on the tombs of their fathers to be soon effaced with impunity. We may be sure, then, that those innumerable paintings which we see broken through in order to make more modern graves must have been of considerable antiquity at the time of their destruction. Then, again, it must not be forgotten that some of these paintings were actually appealed to as ancient testimony in the days of St. Jerome, on occasion of a dispute between that doctor and St. Augustine as to the correct rendering of a particular word in his Latin translation of the Scriptures. Finally, it is notorious that the fine arts had rapidly decayed and the number of their professors diminished before the days of Constantine—in fact, before the end of the third century. We cannot, however, pretend to give in these pages even a brief summary of De Rossi’s arguments and observations whereby he establishes the primitive antiquity of Christian art in the Catacombs. We can only mention a few of the more popular and palpable proofs which can be appreciated by all without difficulty; and we will only add that it is now possible, under the sure chronological guidance of De Rossi, to distinguish three successive stages in the development of painting in the Christian cemeteries, the latest of which was complete when the Constantinian era began, and the first falls hardly, if at all, short of even apostolic times. This is no longer denied by the best instructed even among Protestant controversialists; they acknowledge that painting was used by the earliest Christians for the ornamenting of their places of burial; only they contend that it was done “not because it was congenial to the mind of Christianity so to illustrate the faith, but because it was the heathen custom so to honor the dead.” The author of this remark, however, has omitted to explain whence it comes to pass that the great majority of the paintings which survive in the cemeteries are more engaged in illustrating the mysteries of the faith than in doing honor to the dead.