y destroy, as in
the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could
to efface their truest interest, their local and historical
association.

A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds
of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places,
and which need special scientific classification, such collections are
necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot
where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far
nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had
been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he
had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the
Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a
private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the
recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that
sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead;
that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and
that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more
instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of
the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of
"Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the
light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and
_gentiles_ laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican,
numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome
inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber
who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a
heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of
ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of
heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.

Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St.
Constantia--be her legend true or false, it makes no difference--to
trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian
worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned
about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see
the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the
central point of the building, with the series of images which is
begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn
away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand a