forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his
companion.

[98] An old flower-garden in the rear of the house, set here and
there with a venerable olive-tree--a picture in pensive shade and
fiery blossom, as transparent, under that afternoon light, as the old
miniature-painters' work on the walls of the chambers within--was
bounded towards the west by a low, grass-grown hill. A narrow
opening cut in its steep side, like a solid blackness there, admitted
Marius and his gleaming leader into a hollow cavern or crypt, neither
more nor less in fact than the family burial-place of the Cecilii, to
whom this residence belonged, brought thus, after an arrangement then
becoming not unusual, into immediate connexion with the abode of the
living, in bold assertion of that instinct of family life, which the
sanction of the Holy Family was, hereafter, more and more to
reinforce. Here, in truth, was the centre of the peculiar religious
expressiveness, of the sanctity, of the entire scene. That "any
person may, at his own election, constitute the place which belongs
to him a religious place, by the carrying of his dead into it":--had
been a maxim of old Roman law, which it was reserved for the early
Christian societies, like that established here by the piety of a
wealthy Roman matron, to realise in all its consequences. Yet this
was certainly unlike any cemetery Marius had ever before seen; most
obviously in this, that these people had returned to the older
fashion of disposing of [99] their dead by burial instead of burning.
Originally a family sepulchre, it was growing to a vast necropolis, a
whole township of the deceased, by means of some free expansion of
the family interest beyond its amplest natural limits. That air of
venerable beauty which characterised the house and its precincts
above, was maintained also here. It was certainly with a great