startled by the excesses of the mobs,' and adds, 'that the exasperation of the most intelligent operatives was intense.'

Colonel Jackson, who from his copious experience and conspicuous sufferings, is entitled to express an opinion, while defending 'the general good character of the Blackburn operative,' 'reconciles' it with the bitter and revengeful hatred shown' against himself, through the incessant stimulus to ill-feeling applied by the delegates at the various public meetings, at which ejaculations, 'We'll shoot him! We'll hang him!' have followed the more exciting paragraphs of their speeches without reproof.' But then, who are the delegates ? Operatives of the operatives' is the only answer. They are the concentrated essence of their class; i.e., if Colonel Jackson is right, the concentrated essence of its bitter feeling. We ought to add that, inconsistent as it may seem, the strike funds of the operatives have been largely subsidized by the employers themselves. Blinded by mob-passion the former forgot even mercenary gratitude, and rifled the very mills and homesteads from which they were drawing relief.

The dominant question for all classes, during this critical period of the cotton industry, was, how could the whole interest be kept from going to pieces? And this could only be solved practically by the employers taking upon themselves the responsibility of maintaining it. For the moment they looked to the social bond alone, and let political economy go. If they could not maintain the industrial army tolerably unbroken, the question whether employers or operatives prevailed in the end would be a purely speculative one. Even if they won, their victory would be useless, unless they kept the workpeople from being scattered meanwhile. In order to maintain the connexion, they used that most sacred of retaining fees, help in the day of need. In the first place they were social beings with human feelings; they were financial strategists afterwards; and their object was to bind Lancashire together, and prove to the rest of England, as in the days of the Cotton Famine, that she had one heart.

We fear very much that there are signs, notwithstanding, that the cotton industry can hardly ever again be what it was. Indeed, a much wider field than cotton seems open to the same prognostic. The spirit of trade-unionism threatens ruin to all the production of the country. The British workman has learned to grudge his labour, and as he is sowing so he will surely reap. He insists on short time; so did the hare, and despised the 'competitive power' of the tortoise.

SHORT NOTICES.

A Visit to the Roman Catacombs. By the Rev. J. SPENCER NORTHCOTE, D.D., Canon of Birmingham. (London: Burns and Oates, 1877.)

The Catacombs of Rome, Historical and Descriptive, with a Chapter on the Symbolism of Early Christian Art. By the Author of The Buried Cities of Campania, &c. (London, Edinburgh, and New York: T. Nelson and Sons.)

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THESE two manuals are both intended for the same purpose-to serve as a guide to the Roman Catacombs, and each is good in its way the one is by a convert to Romanism, and is intended chiefly for the use of Roman Catholics, and the author has the advantage of being thoroughly well acquainted with his subject, only allowance must be made for the rose-coloured spectacles through which he views every object, and an evident and not unnatural wish to lead other people to follow his example. The other is in some respects the reverse; the author is a Protestant, and his book is very Protestant, and, unfortunately, he is not well acquainted with his subject. He appears to have compiled his book from other good authorities, without having ever been to Rome himself, if we may judge by his extraordinary and evidently unconscious blunders about localities.

We propose to give a concise account of each of these manuals, with a few extracts.

To begin with the Roman Catholic one, as on the whole the best, we are obliged to demur at the first page. Roma Sotterranea is a misleading title: it leads many an American or Englishman, who takes it in his head to see the celebrated Roman Catacombs, to expect to find them really under the city of Rome, and he is much surprised to find that they are generally two miles off, and some of them much more. The oft-quoted passage from S. Jerome has probably led to too many pilgrimages to the Catacombs, and seems to have been quoted for this object; these pilgrimages are not often very religious or reverential, and perhaps the modern Romans are not far wrong saying that their main object is to bring money to the priests.

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The woodcuts in this volume are very good and attractive, and convey the idea of the Catacombs extremely well, although they are not quite accurate. Dr. Northcote's attempt on p. 7 to show that the Catacombs have no connexion with the old sandpits, is going too far, from one extreme to the other; they are not sandpits, but they are almost all connected with an old sandpit road. When he says, to prove his point, that they happen not to be excavated either in sand or in stone, but precisely in a rock of intermediate consistency, too solid to be used as sand, too soft and friable to be used as

building stone,' he generalises too much from the one example that has been so admirably illustrated by the two brothers De Rossi ; it is not by any means true of all; the material necessarily depends on the nature of the soil in which the fossores had to make the graves; several of them are in clay, others in alluvial soil; besides tufa is a building stone, though soft, and not calculated to bear much weight. All the walls of Rome of the time of the Kings are built of tufa, although tufa sometimes may vary in quality, from the solid stone to mere sand. Tufa was originally volcanic dust, such as overwhelmed Pompeii, and Pozzolana sand is still tufa; it is commonly hardened by time and moisture, and some other circumstances, and varies greatly in colour also, but it is tufa still.

That 'the Roman Catacombs were made solely for the sake of burying the dead,' is absolutely true; but when Dr. Northcote goes to say, 'But by whom? and to bury what dead? we answer, and again without hesitation,-by Christians, and only to bury Christians,' he begs a question which is really a very doubtful one. Such is the modern Roman theory, supported by the high authority of De Rossi (if not first proposed by him); the old authorities do not say so, and the large number of Pagan inscriptions found in the Catacombs does not agree with this theory; and when he says that all these pagan inscriptions were taken down as old marble only, he again begs the question. A large proportion of them have no appearance of having been taken there for that purpose, but as an actual inscription to be put on the grave of the person buried there, often with the mortar adhering to it. The Christian inscriptions have nearly all been carried away to be put in museums and churches, but the pagan ones were left where they are found. The assertion (p. 49) that, 'as, in the beginning of the fifth century, they had ceased to be used as places of burial, so in the first half of the ninth, they ceased to be frequented for purposes of devotion,' is not borne out by the inscriptions. Though in the later period they are not common, they do not cease altogether; nor with the history of Anastasius, who records many restorations of them by the Popes in the eighth and ninth centuries. Dr. Northcote mentions, at page 50, the legend, as if it was gospel truth, that the bodies of SS. Peter and Paul had a temporary resting-place in the cemetery (or catacomb) of S. Sebastian ad Catacumbas; but he omits to mention that the Circus of Maxentius was also made ad Catacumbas, and that S. Sebastian's was long called the Catacomb, being probably the entrance to several, and this is the name of the valley under the hill, on which stands the tomb of Cæcilia Metella.

In inscriptions on tombstones, and in the graffiti, or scratchings on the plaster of the walls of the third century in Rome, the mixture of Greek and Latin words is very common; as may be seen in the guard chambers of the Palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine, and in any collection of tombstones. The Greek kata, ‘under,' and the Latin, cumba, 'the hill,' is therefore very likely to have been the name given to this valley, and to the cemeteries in this valley, and those the earliest, Prætextatus and S. Urban's, as well as S. Sebastian's; that name was applied to them, and soon became the general name for

them in Rome, and from Rome spread to other places. The name given to them by Anastasius is always cœmeteria. In Dr. Northcote's chapter on "Their Paintings and Sculpture' he has ingeniously mixed together two things which are not necessarily connected. The sculpture on the Sarcophagi cannot be restored, but the paintings may be, and often were. About thirty Catacombs are recorded to have been restored by the Popes in the eighth and ninth centuries; and the things which were likely to be restored are the paintings, and this agrees with what we find, but which Dr. Northcote altogether ignores. Those who are at all acquainted with the history of art can see at a glance the difference between a painting of the seventh century and one of the third or fourth; and it is certain that three-fourths of the paintings are restorations of the later period, as Mr. Parker has shown by his photo-engravings; but those only excite the ire of Dr. Northcote, who cannot see that these are restorations, his rosecoloured spectacles will not allow him to see them. Then, in the sculpture also, it is well known to all who have studied the subject, that the Christian Sarcophagi are all of the fourth or fifth centuries; there are no restorations of them, but they do not belong to the first three centuries;' that some of the paintings on the vaults are of the second century is true, but they are not of Christian or religious subjects. The Vine on the vault of the great entrance chamber of Prætextatus is of the second century, but the Good Shepherd on the wall of the same chamber was of the fourth (it was destroyed in 1876). It is shown in Dr. Northcote's woodcut at p. 69, but too small to show the different styles of drawing. The Vine on the vault of the passage at one of the entrances to S. Domitilla, Nereus, and Achilleus is of the third century; the character of the drawing is not like the one in Prætextatus. The other figures of 'Daniel in the Lions' den,' 'Noe in the Ark,' &c., which Dr. Northcote assumes to be of the same period, because they are close at hand, are not earlier than the fourth, many of them later. "The Good Shepherd' is not necessarily a Christian subject; the Christians adopted it from the heathens, but by far the greater number of them, and they are very numerous, are undoubtedly Christian, and some of them may be of the third. The style of drawing in the pretty woodcuts in Dr. Northcote's book is evidently that of the modern artist of the nineteenth century, who has drawn them on the wood. If compared with Mr. Parker's photographs and photo-engravings, the different style of art is very evident; in some cases they are not like the same picture. In one instance only Dr. Northcote acknowledges that the paintings are so rudely drawn, that 'probably they belong to the age of the translation of the relics, i.e. the ninth century.' He cannot see that the same remark applies to many others. With these slight blunders, which are what might be expected, this is a very good and useful guide to the Catacombs of Rome.

The other guide to the Catacombs is more ambitious than Dr. Northcote's, as will be seen by the title-page already given. It professes to be Historical and Descriptive,' and to explain the 'Symbolism of Early Christian Art.' The idea is a good one, and it is fairly

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executed as far as can be done by a compilation from good authorities, without taking the trouble to go and see the Catacombs themselves, so as to understand them more thoroughly. The woodcuts in this volume are also fairly drawn, but from the inaccurate drawings of Perret, not from the photographs. The first chapter, 'Where the Catacombs are situated,' betrays the real ignorance of the author on the subject. He can see no difference between the drawing of the second century and that of the ninth, and although he intends to clear up the misrepresentations of the Romanists,' he adopts their statements as if they were gospel. He has hit upon the right explanation of the name catacomb, ad Catacumbas (p. 12), but he attributes it to the seventh century, whereas it was used in the third and fourth. He adopts De Rossi's estimate that 'the galleries of the Catacombs extended to 587 geographical miles,' which can be only a guess, there can be no real calculation. He says that the country about Rome consists almost entirely of volcanic rocks, of which the most ancient is a compact conglomerate, known as lithoid tufa, and still largely employed as building stone; while above it lie ejected ashes and scoriæ, mixed with a few currents of solid lava. Underneath the lithoid tufa we come to the granular tufa, and it is in this formation the Catacombs are mainly excavated. This stone is dry and porous, and therefore easily worked; and, being dry and porous, it rendered the galleries excavated in it not unsuitable as retreats for the living, a purpose to which they were often devoted.' This is altogether a misunderstanding of the description by De Rossi, and calculated entirely to mislead the student. To the single Catacomb of S. Calixtus, which alone De Rossi has described, it is practically true, but to many others it does not apply at all, and the assumption that they were often devoted as retreats for the living is not true. In the sharp but short persecution of the Christians under Julian the Apostate, the Bishops of Rome used to reside in the Monastery of S. Sebastian, or of S. Urban ad Catacumbas, and as there were subterranean passages from these into the Catacombs, and through the galleries of the Catacombs, with outlets known only to the Christian fossores, they might thus have escaped; but on one occasion the Pope was performing the service called THE MASS, in the small chapel at the entrance to the Catacomb of Prætextatus, and with the true martyr-spirit would not stop the service to escape, and was taken off to the place of public execution, where the Monastery of S. Sisto Vecchio now stands, and was beheaded there, having been legally condemned to death by the authorities.

The successive layers of tufa, collected in many ages, vary considerably in all sorts of ways, in thickness from a few inches to twenty or thirty feet, and in quality and colour; some of the layers are still volcanic dust or sand, others have been hardened into stone, harder or softer according to circumstances. It is also a great blunder or exaggeration, when our author says, 'the Christian community set to work to enlarge the Catacombs; they constructed them one below the other; sometimes as many as five rows or stages of galleries were superimposed in the same crypt; the uppermost would not be