The sepulchral inscriptions are short and simple, but often extremely tender and touching, recalling to memory, in a few brief words, the innocence and purity of life, the beauty and the wisdom, or the amiable, peace-loving character, of the deceased. The pompous or desponding tone of the heathen mortuary inscriptions disappears; the Christian ‘sleeps and sleeps in peace.’ There is no sign of affectation or hypocrisy in these simple epitaphs, and the ennobling influence of the new creed upon the spirit of man is, perhaps, nowhere more conspicuous than in the unostentatious inscriptions traced upon the tombs of its first confessors. The use of the catacombs for the various purposes of interment, assembly, or concealment began, no doubt, with the first persecution under Nero. Most of the inscriptions however, bear the date of the fourth or fifth century, and some are evidently of a much later period. When this custom may have ceased is uncertain, but in the Middle Ages the catacombs were entirely forgotten, and remained blocked up, until towards the end of the sixteenth century, when they were reopened and explored by the indefatigable and courageous Antony Bosio, who devoted thirty-three years of his life to this labour. During his frequent wanderings through the Roman Campagna, this zealous archæologist once found, to the left of the Appian Way, near to the church of Sancta Maria in Palmis, a brick vault in a field covered with rubbish. He immediately presumed it to be the entrance of a catacomb, and descended through the narrow opening. Fired with scientific ardour, he penetrated further and further into recesses untrodden for centuries by the foot of man. The passage soon became so narrow and low as to oblige him to creep, but neither the difficulty of the exploration, nor the fear of being crushed to death by the crumbling stones, could restrain him; and thus, day after day, he continued his perilous search, until, finally, a complete subterranean city revealed itself, although he could not ascertain its limits, for, however far he might probe its intricacies, new passages were still branching out on every side, and the maze descended in several successive stories deeper and deeper into the earth. After Bosio, other archæologists have continued his researches, and in our days the Cavaliere de Rossi—to whose indefatigable zeal is due, amongst others, the discovery of the Catacomb of Callistus, where many of the early popes have been entombed—has all but completed the topography of subterranean Rome.