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There are family mausoleums, gloomy and sepulchral looking, in the Grecian style; family burying-grounds neatly enclosed by iron or bronze railings, where white marble crosses mark the graves; there are tombs with epitaphs, and tombs with statues; there are simple cenotaphs and monumental slabs, and nameless graves marked by numbers only.
Strange, fantastical, granite kopjes like mighty mausoleums adorned with ilex trees barred their path, and Diana was convinced some of the bones of her ancestors lay buried there, because she felt so weirdly at home with them. "This is my natural environment," she informed her uncle and the engineer. "I ought to be dwelling here in state, as the favourite wife of the greatest chief in the land."
Peter's Church; circuses where, it is said, three hundred and eighty-five thousand persons could witness the games and chariot-races at a time; bridges, still standing, which have furnished models for the most beautiful at Paris and London; aqueducts carried over arches one hundred feet in height, through which flowed the surplus water of distant lakes; drains of solid masonry in which large boats could float; pillars more than one hundred feet in height, coated with precious marbles or plates of brass, and covered with bas-reliefs; obelisks brought from Egypt; fora and basilicas connected together, and extending more than three thousand feet in length, every part of which was filled with "animated busts" of conquerors, kings, statesmen, poets, publicists, and philosophers; mausoleums greater and more splendid than that Artemisia erected to the memory of her husband; triumphal arches under which marched in stately procession the victorious armies of the Eternal City, preceded by the spoils and trophies of conquered empires.
The superb mausoleums of Leopardi and of the Lombardi at Venice are, perhaps, equally beautiful; but I am inclined to give the preference to the work of Bernardo Rossellini. He became acquainted with Leonardo Bruni at the Papal Court, where he, as well as Leo Battista Alberti, was a director of the pontifical works. The Madonna let into the upper part of the monument is by Andrea Verocchio....
Both the Inca and the Portuguese narrative agree in the account of the almost incredible number of pearls there found. It is said that the Spaniards obtained fourteen bushels, and that the princess assured them, that by visiting the mausoleums of the various villages, they could find enough pearls to load down all the horses of the army.
Every thing serves to prove the desire in man of surviving himself. Pyramids, mausoleums, monuments, epitaphs, all shew that he is willing to prolong his existence even beyond his decease.
The open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin, the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death.
Some of the cracked, dilapidated tombs dated back to 1600; others marked the addition in 1788 to the original God's-acre. All was hushed; it was difficult to imagine a phantom where neglect seemed to rule. It was not in this olden part that descendants of the departed flocked on All Saints' Day to decorate the mausoleums with evergreens, plaster images and artificial immortelle garlands.
Go into Westminster Abbey, and you will find that what raises the admiration of the spectator is not the mausoleums of the English kings, but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to perpetuate the memory of those illustrious men who contributed to its glory.
His palace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter Amalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of Belisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels of Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediæval wars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous with marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around them.
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