ancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin,
than the fiercer days when Castracane was Sciarra's guest on the other
side of the church.

The Basilica of the Apostles is said to have been built by Pelagius the
First, who was made Pope in the year 555, and who dedicated it to Saint
Philip and Saint James. Recent advances in the study of archaeology make
it seem more than probable that he adapted for the purpose a part of the
ancient barracks of the Vigiles, of which the central portion appears
almost to coincide with the present church, at a somewhat different
angle; and in the same way it is likely that the remains of the north
wing were rebuilt at a later period by the Colonna as a fortified
palace. In those times men would not have neglected to utilize the
massive substructures and walls. However that may be, the Colonna dwelt
there at a very early date, and in eight hundred years or more have only
removed their headquarters from one side of the church to the other. The
latter has been changed and rebuilt, and altered again, like most of the
great Roman sanctuaries, till it bears no resemblance to the original
building. The present church is distinctly ugly, with the worst defects
of the early eighteenth century; and that age was as deficient in
cultivated taste as it was abhorrent of natural beauty. Some fragments
of the original frescos that adorned the apse are now preserved in a
hall behind the main Sacristy of Saint Peter's. Against the flat walls,
under the inquisition of the crudest daylight, the fragments of Melozzo
da Forli's masterpiece are masterpieces still; the angelic faces,
imprisoned in a place not theirs, reflect the sadness of art's
captivity; and the irretrievable destruction of an inimitable past
excites the pity and resentment of thoughtful men. The attempt to outdo
the works of the great has exhibited the contemptible imbecility of the
little, and the coarse-grained vanity of Clement the Eleventh has
parodied the poetry of art in the bombastic prose of a vulgar tongue.
Pope Pelagius took for his church the pillars and marbles of Trajan's
Forum, in the belief that his acts were acceptable to God; but Clement
had no such excuse, and the edifice which was a monument of faith has
given place to the temple of a monumental vanity.

[Illustration: FORUM OF TRAJAN]

It is remarkable that the Colonna rarely laid their dead in the Church
of the Apostles, for it was virtually theirs by right of immediate
neighbourh