all of the church, overtopped by its triangular gable. Behind
this wall is a yard or atrium, the pavement grass-grown, the walls
stained with great patches of mildew, and showing here and there in
their dilapidation the shaft and capital of a bricked-up Ionic pillar.
The place tells of centuries of neglect, of the gradual invasion of
resistless fever; and it was fitly chosen, some fifty years ago, for the
abode of a community of Trappists. In the reign of Innocent VIII. it
was still nominally in the hands of certain Cistercians; but the fever
had long driven these monks to the more wholesome end of the hill, where
they had erected a smaller church; and the convent had served for years
as a fortress of the turbulent family of the Capranicas, one of whose
members was always the nominal abbot, with the Cardinal's hat, and title
Jervase and Protasius. And now, at the end of the fifteenth century, a
Cardinal Ascanio Capranica, famous for his struggle in magnificence and
sinfulness with the magnificent and sinful young nephews of Pope Sixtus,
had determined to restore the fortified monastery, to combat the fever
by abundant plantations, and to make the church a monument of his
splendour. And, in order to secure some benefit by his own munificence,
he had begun by commissioning Domenico Neroni to design and execute
a sepulchre three storeys high, full of carvings, and covered with
statues, so that his soul, if sent untimely to heaven, might not be
dishonoured by the unworthy resting-place of its trusty companion, the
Cardinal's handsome and well-tended body.

This church of SS. Jervase and Protasius, which imitated, like most
churches of the early Christian period, the form of a basilica or court
of law, was constructed out of fragments of Pagan edifices, and occupied
the site of a Pagan edifice, whose columns had been employed to carry
the roof of the church, or, when of porphyry or serpentine, had been
sawed into discs for the pavement. On the slant of the hill, supporting
the apse, encircled by pillarets, is a round mass of masonry, overgrown
with ivy and ilex scrub, the remains of some antique bath or grotto;
and under the battlemented walls, the cloistered courts of the convent,
there stretches, it is said, a network of subterranean passages running
down to the Tiber. Four hundred years ago they were not to be discovered
if looked for, being completely hidden by the fallen masonry and the
cypress roots and growths of poiso