What a buyer of statuary from the Torlonia Gallery would insist on doing, would be to drag the statues out into the sunshine and go over them with a microscope and see where a piece of marble had been added, or where a new face had been put on old work. Then he would be able to form a judgment as to the value of the statue or bust. And this is precisely the treatment to which the legends of the martyrs have to be subjected. But this treatment tells sometimes in their favour. Narratives that at first sight seem conspicuously false or manufactured, will under the critical microscope reveal the sutures, and show what is old and genuine, and what is adventitious and worthless. [Illustration: S. AGNES.] III _S. AGNES_ About a mile from the Porta Pia, beside the Nomentine road that leads from Rome to the bridge over the Arno and to Montana, are the basilica and catacomb of S. Agnese. We are there on high ground, and here the parents of the saint had a villa and vineyard. They were Christians, and their garden had an entrance to a catacomb in which the faithful were interred. We know this, because some of the burials in the passages underground are of more ancient date than the martyrdom of S. Agnes, which took place in 304. A little lane, very dirty, leads down hence into the Salarian road, and there is a mean dribble of a stream in a hollow below. The rock is all of the volcanic tufa that is so easily cut, but which in the roads resolves itself into mud of the dirtiest and most consistent description. New Rome is creeping along the road, its gaunt and eminently vulgar houses are destroying the beauty of this road, which commanded exquisite views of the Sabine and Alban mountains, and the lovely Torlonia gardens have already been destroyed. Nor is this all, for the foundations of these useless and hideous buildings are being driven down into more than one old catacomb, which as soon as revealed is destroyed. Where now stands the basilica of S. Agnese was the catacomb in which her body was laid. The church is peculiar, in that it is half underground. One has to descend into it by a staircase of forty-five ancient marble steps, lined with inscriptions taken from the catacomb. The cause for this peculiarity is not that the soil has risen about the basilica, but that when it was proposed to build the church over the tomb of the saint who was below in the catacomb, the whole of the crust of rock and earth above was removed, so that the subterranean passages were exposed to light; and then the foundations of the sacred edifice were laid on this level, and were carried up above the surface of the ground.