"The recollection of Rome will come back, after many years, in images of long delicious strolls, in musing loneliness, through the deserted ways of the ancient city; of climbing among its hills, over ruins, to reach some vantage-ground for mapping out the subjacent territory, and looking beyond on the glorious chains of greater and lesser mountains, clad in their imperial hues of gold and purple; and then, perhaps, of solemn entrance into the cool solitude of an open basilica, where your thought now rests, as your body then did, after the silent evening prayer, and brings forward from many well-remembered nooks, every local inscription, every lovely monument of art, the characteristic feature of each, or the great names with which it is associated. The Liberian speaks to you of Bethlehem and its treasured mysteries; the Sessorian of Calvary and its touching relics. Baronius gives you his injunctions on Christian architecture inscribed, as a legacy, in his title of Fasciola; St. Dominic lives in the fresh paintings of a faithful disciple, on the walls of the opposite church of St. Xystus; there stands the chair and there hangs the hat of St. Charles, as if he had just left his own church, from which he calls himself in his signature to letters 'the Cardinal of St. Praxedes;' near it, in a sister church, is fresh the memory of St. Justin Martyr, addressing his apologies for Christianity to heathen emperor and senate, and of Pudens and his British spouse; and, far beyond the city gates, the cheerful Philip[159] is seen kneeling at S. Sebastiano, waiting for the door to the Platonia to be opened for him, that he may watch the night through in the martyr's dormitory."--_Wiseman's Life of Leo XII._