Kate Gearey Or Irish Life in London Author:Mason General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1853 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XVI. LINA. It was the festival of Saint Agnes, and the pure transparent sky which constitutes one of the principal charms of a Roman winter lent a beauty, peculiarly its own, to the lofty crumbling walls, so gay in their attire of luxuriant ivy, that enclose the vineyard by which the ancient baptistry of " Sta Agnese fuori le Mura" better known as the mausoleum of "Sta Costanza" is surrounded. It had been at an unusually early hour (at least for the English inhabitants of the Eternal city to bestir themselves) that a numerous and mixed party issued from the Porta Nomentana (Pia), for the purpose of visiting the magnificent church erected by Constantine on the level of the catacombs where the body of the saint was discovered; as they descended the marble steps leading1 to the nave, there was of course the usual parade of disrespectful levity by which our countrymen consider themselves bound to wound the purest and best feelings of those, on the august ceremonies of whose religion they are prompted by curiosity to intrude; and in accordance with this fixed principle (although mass was at that moment commencing in a small chapel celebrated as possessing Michael Angelo's sculptured " Head of Christ"), they scrupled not to linger on the staircase, decipher the inscriptions with which its walls are covered; lounge against the columns, discuss the relative merits of granite, pavonazzo, and porta-santa marble, of which they are formed, in no very modulated tones ; whilst one, and she was of thegentler sex, actually drew forth her tablets, and for the amusement of her companions produced a spirited ca...« less