Of the epitaphs and inscriptions carved and painted on these graves, some are exquisitely worked, evidently by professional artists. Many more, however, were rudely and hurriedly painted or scratched on the plaster or stone tablet which closed in the shelf in the wall in which the dead was laid. The inscriptions are for the most part in Latin, but in the first and in much of the second century the words are often in Greek. In some instances the two languages are curiously mingled, the epitaph beginning in one tongue and ending in another: occasionally the Latin words are written in Greek characters. Various corrupt ways of spelling are not unusual, the ordinary rules of grammar are not unfrequently broken. Indeed, as is observable in some of the Latin poetry of the early Christian centuries where the rules of classical prosody are ignored, so here in the prose used by the children of the people a similar disregard of language and spelling is observable. It was the beginning of the popular patois which eventually crystallized into modern Italian. There is a curious and interesting difference between the epitaphs of the catacombs written when Christianity was a proscribed religion, when those who embraced it were liable to more or less bitter persecution, and the epitaphs of the latter years of the fourth as of the following centuries. Men wrote in those first three Christian centuries in the dark and lonely corridors and chambers where their loved dead were laid, not for any human eye to read, save their own when they visited that sacred God’s Acre,--just a name--or an emblem of their dearest hopes, a little picture of the Good Shepherd and His sheep, a word or two of sure hope and joyous confidence in the eternal future--and nothing more. Very short, very simple, very touching are these early Christian epitaphs. The great and noble set out no pompous statement of the rank and position of their dead: we read little of the piety and goodness of the many saintly ones whose remains rested in those long silent corridors. But in the cemeteries (mostly above ground) of the last years of the fourth and in the following centuries, when the Church enjoyed peace, and when a different spirit brooded over the works and days of Christians, we begin to meet with those foolish tasteless phrases which as time went on became more and more in fashion, telling of the dead one’s rank and position, of the goodness and holiness and devotion of the deceased. Dean Stanley quotes an epitaph in the cloisters of his loved Abbey of Westminster, which he says reminded him of the catacomb inscriptions in a way which none other of the pompous and elaborate epitaphs in that noble English home of the great dead had done. It is of a little girl, and runs thus: “Jane Lister · deare childe.”