[14] Italics not mine, but so printed in the extract.
[15] Feast of St. Peter's Chair.
[16] Feast of St. Peter.
CHAPTER XXXI.
The Legends, the Popes, and the Pasquinades.
The Manufacture of St. Philomena.
Before quitting the subject of the relics at Rome, I must give my readers what Hare calls "the extraordinary history of the manufacture of S. Filomena, now one of the most popular saints in Italy, and one towards whom idolatry is carried out with frantic enthusiasm both at Domo d'Ossola and in some of the Neapolitan States."
"In the year 1802, while some excavations were going forward in the Catacombs of Priscilla, a sepulchre was discovered containing the skeleton of a young female; on the exterior were rudely painted some of the symbols constantly recurring in these chambers of the dead—an anchor, an olive branch (emblems of Hope and Peace), a scourge, two arrows, and a javelin; above them the following inscription, of which the beginning and end were destroyed: