to the nobility, the bishops, the abbies, and other dignitaries. The successive generations of great and powerful men in time, however, glutted these vaults, and in spite of the inscriptions which extolled virtues the defunct never possessed, the memory of a lord, or a bishop, frequently perished the day after his obsequies had been performed. Sad neglect this of an ungrateful race of heirs, relations and vassals.

"The custom of thus shutting up the remains of the dead in the interior of the temples of the Deity, far from being agreeable to the majesty of the place, has still the inconve nience of giving a false and ridiculous style to the architecture employed in decorating these little mansions of the great, where every rustic may with Alpin say, ' With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before! For the architects obliged to proportion it to the smallness of the speck allotted to the undertaking, these monuments destined to honour in the eyes of posterity, the memory of great men, produced pitiful works unworthy of being ever exposed to the light of day, and in the vast field of nature. One might even ask an enlightened architect what effect tombs of twelve feet square, would produce were they, after the manner of the Romans, erected on the skirts of the highways in isolated places. Assuredly none, and the tombs one sees in the Museum of French Monuments, Rue de petits Augustins, if erected in such places as are becoming the sepulchral monuments of great men, would be as unworthy the names of the artists who designed them for churches and cloisters, as of the great men to whom they are consecrated.

"At length some part of mankind was persuaded it was really dangerous to dwell too near cemeteries; and Paris first set the example of removing these dépôts from the interior of her walls but this useful revolution, so long desired by all men who pretended to take the health of their fellow citizens into their hands, began only in the end of the last century, and had the French confined themselves to a revolution in favour of health, cleanliness, and comfort, they would have done well. Paris, under the wise and paternal government of the unfortunate Louis XVI. set the example of removing from without its walls those huge dépôts of contagion which had for ages crowded the Charnier of the Innocents, and the bones which were thus dug up were carried to the Catacombs. The cemetery of the Innocents, the largest then in

Paris, was dangerous from its position, situated in the centre of the quarter St. Denis, one of the most populous quarters of the capital; but by 1788 all the bones it contained were dug up; and in the same manner many other cemeteries within the walls of the city were emptied; in fine, in 1790, at the moment the revolution began like a torrent to sweep away all ancient usages and customs, it was decreed by the national assembly, that all churches and villages should abandon their ancient cemeteries, and choose new ones without their walls; nor should the interior of churches be disfigured by burying the dead in them. This decree, whose design was salutary, but whose execution was most foolishly gone about in many cases, served as a pretext for all the devastations which were committed in 1793, and caused to dis. appear from the face of France a crowd of monuments, as precious under the direction of the arts, as from the great events they failed not to recal to the mind of man.

"The grand charnier of the innocents was a vaulted gallery, which surrounded what was called the Champ eaux, or the Petits Champs, and this latter was the cemetery of no less than twenty parishes of Paris! The last grave digger, Francois Poutrain, of the Champ eaux, interred in the space of thirty years alone, more than eighty-four thousand corpses, thus making nearly three thousand annually. And if we reckon from the year 1186, when Philippe Auguste, first caused the cemetery Petits Champs, to be walled in, to the end of the six centuries it received the dead of twenty parishes, at the rate of two thousand annually, we shall compute one million two hundred thousand corpses interred! But this cemetery existed many centuries before the time of Philippe Auguste, and was for ages the only burial place in Paris.

Judge then, Edward, how unwholesome must have been a residence in the neighbourhood of this charnier, or bonehouse; this abyss of death! The bones from this charnier, with all those of eighteen cemeteries besides, are now piled up in the grand central dépôt of the Catacombs.

"So much for the general outline; now for the detail. It was M. Lenoir who had indicated the ancient quarries beneath the Fauxbourg of St. Germain, as a place the most favourable for this central dépôt of the ashes of the dead; and M. Crosne, his successor, appointed Charles Axel Guillamont to prepare these caverns for the reception of the bones

which might be dug out of the cemetery of the Innocents. Fortunately these quarries, thus designed to become the Ca. tacombs of Paris, were already, so to speak, in a condition to serve for this new purpose; and they required no repairs, except those necessary to fit them for their ulterior destination. Scooped out in times of the monarchy the most remote, they still were practical for this new purpose.

"When the Fauxbourgs of St. Germain and St. Jacques extended themselves on the left bank of the Seine, towards the plain of Mount Souris, in 1774 and 1776, many accidents happened to houses in those quarters, from the roofs of the quarries giving way; and the police appointed commissioners to examine these souterrains, who, finding them in a deplorable condition, commenced operations to secure them from furthermore falling in, and in a few years the ruin which the inhabitants were one and all threatened with, was no longer dreaded. It was this labour which prepared these quarries to become the Catacombs.

"In order, however, to have a respectable entrance to this grand dépôt of the dead, a house was bought which had long gone by the name of the Tomb of Isoire, a famous robber, who 'tis said had been killed and buried in this place. A stair was accordingly cut in the rock, by which to descend into this dark region of silence how dead! and darkness how profound!' and in another place, a well or pit was hewn down, for the purpose of hurling whole cart loads of bones extracted from the cemeteries, deep into these quarries, where formerly nor eye nor list'ning ear an object found.'

up.

"On the 7th of April, 1786, the interior of the Catacombs was consecrated to the reception of the ashes of the dead, by the clergy of Paris in great pomp, and the following day this great work of reformation commenced, by transporting the bones from the Champ eaux; for the workmen had already been some months employed in digging them With the bones of the dead, were transported from this cemetery all the tombs, the crosses, the coffins of stone and of lead, the tablets of stone, of marble, and of lead and brass, with their inscriptions, &c. and they were arranged in order around the tomb of Isoire, in a spot which had been consecrated at the same time as the Catacombs; but all these objects which veneration for religion and for the manes of the dead had so long preserved with unshaken piety, shared the general devastation of 1793, and the tomb of

Isoire sold as national property is now, after having passed through ten several possessors in twenty years, the place where a cabaretier has established a guinguette, or teagarden*. It is thus, that in these degenerate days, the cemetery of St. Sulpice has been transformed into a dancing hall. Under the fine inscription,

"Has ultra metas requiescunt beatam spem expectantes, We read,

Bal de Zéphire !"

Our travellers arrived at the cabaretier's guinguette, which is within musket shot of what their guide into the Catacombs, called the tomb of Isoire. It was full half an hour before they could gain admittance where "creation sleeps," and were surrounded by numbers of starving garçons, who had wax tapers to sell to the curious who had travelled thither, where

At the gate which leads into the field where is the stair to the Catacombs, they met a great crowd of English, who. who were putting themselves in order to go down, Some of them drove up to the guinguette in their own carriages; others came to the gate covered with the dust they had gathered walking all the way from Paris; and the distinction which was thus made on their arrival, was kept up where all were on a level; where death, fell tyrant, had unceremoniously abolished rank and title!

"See, Edward," 'said the doctor, "by the bustle round the entrance, the door must be opened; let us follow that motley group."

Having lighted their tapers, they descended eighty-six steps of a deep narrow winding stair. The scene which presented itself when they arrived at the bottom, was awful and imposing to a great degree. The bones of the limbs. and the skulls of beings whose " years fled swifter than a weaver's shuttle," are here piled in rows which the ingenuity of the living devised without any regard to disturbing the

*This is correct, though the traveller is invariably told the guinguette is not, but the small house which covers the stair to the Catacombs is, the Tomb of Isoire. At all events this is the language of the best informed Parisians.

ashes of the dead, or annoying those frail remnants of proud man, by placing the bones of his legs at right angles to each other, while his scull set in the upper segment of the figure, seems to say with the motto usually written below this device, Memento Mori.

No language can paint, no pen can describe the appalling sight which greets the eye in this vast mansion of forgetfulness. 'Tis here the slave and the tyrant, the oppressed and the oppressor, the lord and his vassal, the prince and his subject, the captive and his jailor, countrymen and strangers, men of all ages, of all degrees, conditions and fortunes while living, have their ashes collected and arranged, the labour of a pious and humane posterity; the wonder of transitory travellers, who come hither and gaze on what they must be, without reaping the profit of the lesson which a visit to the Catacombs teaches them!

The gay and the dissipated cannot behold these relics of their fellow-creatures with the smile of indifference, or the look of contempt. No! They preach a language no tongue ever uttered-the lecture of the tomb; and in silence and with horror arrest the heart that is bent on evil, to consider the shortness of all earthly pleasures. 'Tis here the sprightliness of the Parisian forsakes him, and he seeks for the relief his religion brings by reciting a prayer to the Virgin. 'Tis here the Englishman's countenance assumes its proper cast, and the paucity of his speech to the wife of his bosom and the child of his heart, bespeaks the train of meditation his soul has been thrown into. "Tis here the fierceness of the warrior is lost, and his mien becomes placid, gentle, and mild. 'Tis here the saint's face beams with peculiar hope in the belief that death will be swallowed up in victory, though "deep is the sleep of the dead, narrow is their dwelling now, dark the place of their abode"-the Catacombs.

It was reserved for the revolution to hurl pêle mêle into the Catacombs, the victims of its sanguinary hordes, and many monuments placed in these regions of the dead, indicate different epochs of the civil commotions which France, and Paris in particular, was a prey to. The victims who perished opposing revolutionary mobs in the streets of Paris and on the stairs of the Thuilleries, with all those who were massacred in the prisons, and who all owe to M. Guillamont the honour of a place in the Catacombs, will henceforth and annually, have a solemn and expiatory service performed to their