Government has been or can be, which permits this wide and smiling plain to be so unblest an abode to the beings doomed to till the soil, and labour in the fertile fields. The road, though the king's highway, was little better than a quagmire, and was being scantily repaired by wretched-looking labourers. Tales of robbery and violence are still rife amongst these mountainous regions. A landowner was carried off from his own villa at Salerno, and only released by his captors on payment of a huge ransom; while another in Sicily, less fortunate, was mutilated and murdered because 8,000 lire was deemed an insufficient sum. Another, a Sicilian, living ill with his wife, hired an assassin to destroy her; and himself escaped with eighteen months' imprisonment, while his bravo was capitally sentenced.

With these, and such like, and many other tales, did those we met cheerfully beguile the time, and paint the condition of their country and its laws, in colours assuredly not too flatteringly laid on. By-and-by, as the sea begins to glitter on the horizon, a low range of mounds is pointed out as Pompeii; and presently through a wicket gate the traveller enters, and finds himself in a labyrinth of narrow, lava-paved streets, opening on wider spaces, where shattered columns, scattered capitals, and flights of marble steps show where tower, and temple, and palace once stood in splendour of variously shining marbles, and rich entablature, and pillared cornices. The mouldering paintings on the walls are rapidly fading and perishing, all of any value having long been transported to the Museum of Naples ; but nothing in the walls of the ill-fated town moves the spectator to such intense personal pity and emotion as the sight of the bodies, revealed in all their grim distortions of fear and horror by the casting process of Finorelli. A plaster mould covers the real skeleton, which in some cases horribly protrudes. The form left imprinted on the hardened ashes was generally so perfect, that the very expression is in some cases preserved with which the stricken victims met their awful doom. A pathetic interest surely attaches to that young girl's body lying upon its face, the limbs raised in the air as if under a sudden paroxysm of terror. The delicately moulded form, the small head, with the tresses once so beautifully arranged, the long round arms and finely shaped hand, betray a certain distinction even in death. Some light garment is bound tightly above the waist, in preparation doubtless for rapid flight. One hand shields the face. Near

her lies a mother and child in terrible attitudes of agonized fear. A man with a stately Roman face, and the ring on his hand still, lies with one arm beneath him. The feet of this figure look almost impossibly small.

Another, fallen on his back, still grasps what was once a moneybag, which has perished more utterly than himself. A poor dog, entirely perfect, as if from a sculptor's hands, lies writhing in violent convulsions and fiercely biting at himself, the white teeth still glistening in his open jaws uninjured by time's long flight. Beside all these are sundry perfect skeletons; many more are built up in a house and not shown; those of an ass, and a mule, and dogs may be seen, and the perfect bones of a little animal in a copper bowl prepared for the stew that never was served. But after the sight of the human tragedy before us, loaves, chestnuts, and cookery stoves lose their interest. Above us the mountain is suddenly veiled with huge smokeclouds, which hang over its summit; and at night, angry bursts of flame and hot stones cast in the air, betray a smouldering agitation, which makes the feeling of careless security among the numerous dwellers beneath the mountain at once curious and surprising. The Street of Tombs, alternating with the ruins of houses and taverns, leads us from the Herculaneum gate, past a large circular marble seat, given, as its inscription records, by a certain Mamia, "the priest's daughter." Columbaria, for the

most part rudely rifled of their contents, line the inner chambers of these tombs. A few of the cinerary urns are yet in their place, containing the ashes of these long-departed ones; but the most part are broken, and their contents lie scattered around in mournful desolation. The house (so called) of Diomed lies without the walls in this direction, and is a spacious villa with a good-sized garden, piscina or fish-pond lined with marble, and a colonnade, which provided an agreeable shade in sultry weather. A long and perfectly preserved flight of steps leads to the cellars, where near the doors seventeen bodies were found, heaped against the wall, where a darker stain reveals the exact spot. They had, it seems, sought refuge here from the terrors of the eruption, and were smothered and buried in the fine black ash, which, infiltrating through the apertures of the cellar, filled it to the roof. On a fragment of the hardened ash, still to be seen in the Museum of Naples, is the impress of a youthful shoulder and breast, as, flung one against the other, death overtook them in the stifling subterranean darkness. Many wine

jars heaped with ashes attest the generous cheer of Diomed; many still unbroken, are stored where he placed them 1,800 years ago.

Little marble remains, or perhaps existed, at Pompeii. It is a city of brick, cased in stucco. In fact, much of it had been hastily rebuilt after the earthquake of A.D. 33, which had thrown much of the toy city into ruin, and was doubtless the warning of the coming doom-a doom which must have seemed all the more awful from the long quiescence of the mountain, no eruption having occurred for 300 years, when the careless security of Pompeii was suddenly exchanged for the "formlessness of death," as the old Greek poets put it. Paint and yellow ochre, however, make a brave show at a cheap rate, and to these the Pompeians resorted, painting in some cases the outsides of their houses a deep red. Their pavements, in fine mosaic of black, white, and coloured marbles, might be reproduced in our dwellings with good effect; and not less their elegantly-proportioned rooms, so lofty and so light; and the cool atria, with its shady colonnade, and the tiny garden in the centre of the quadrangle, gay with the fairest flowers. Here and there, in some of the houses, a marble table remains intact, poised on carved griffins or lion's paws. Enormous wine jars may still be seen in situ, and the numerous counters of restaurants testify to a brisk and vigorous business carried on in eatables in those days. On a tavern wall we noted a series of rude paintings by some Roman Ostade, of Moorish drinkers over their cups; their mules patiently waiting in their carts, while their masters drank within. The amphitheatre, fallen into disuse and disrepair before A.D. 79, is not much worse now. It is almost wholly perfect. A few of the outer arches only are fallen. The space enclosed is oblong. The area is so small that every one of the seated thousands on the seats above had a perfect view of the struggles and agonies of beasts and men upon the torn and trampled ground,

"Where, while the whole arena shrieks for blood,

Hot in the sand a gladiator dies."-Pope.

The numerous temples in the Pompeian streets bear witness to the wealthy and impartial piety which worshipped Isis, Mars, Bacchus, and Osiris, with equal homage and equal disbelief. The public buildings are on a lavish and splendid scale for the size of the little town. Elegance, profusion, and luxury were the distinguishing characteristics of a city whither chiefly the wealthy

resorted during the summer for the seaside baths and mineral springs which abound along the coast, and are still in vogue.

The traces of fresco on the walls are, as we have said, rapidly becoming less and less owing to the rooflessness of the houses, and the exposure to the weather and the sea winds. Most of the paintings left in situ show signs of a fine traditional school of art, though, of course, rising but seldom above the level of house decoration. The subjects are for the most part classic, the treatment, though conventional, full of spirit, and the colouring bold and bright. The landscapes are, to use a modern phrase, strictly decorative; the surface flat, painted without much shadow, and with a noble disregard of middle distance; nevertheless the figures introduced are full of life; the dress looks not so very dissimilar to that of the present. Boats, bridges, and trees are very often excellently drawn. In fine, there is everywhere apparent throughout Pompeii more luxury of living, a greater elegance, and more refinement, than will be found in the same region now.

But it is in the Museum of Naples that the full development of the Pompeian art is to be chiefly sought. What we there behold too plainly indicates an utter corruption of manners, a degeneracy of morals, and other tokens of a race fallen to the verge of decadence. Plainly shown, too, is the character of that heathen" worship of the body" which Christianity sought so sternly to repress. The subjects selected almost invariably for daily contemplation on the walls of dwelling-houses are those which Plato, in his "Republic," so urgently reprobates as "lies" and "bad tales," and unworthy to be listened to "even if they were true." Mars and Venus, Jove and Europa, Ledas and Ganymedes, Cupids and Amorini, Satyrs and Ariadnes, the riot of Bacchanals; the drunkenness of Silenus; the toilet of Venus, such are the favourite themes of these artists. And other and more lurid lights serve but too well as commentary on St. Paul's description, only too accurate, of the heathen world.

All is "molten down in mere effeminacy." Manliness, vigour, and chastity seem alike absent from these representations, in which the characteristics of sex are so interchanged as to be scarce distinguishable, so soft are the flowing lines, so luxurious the colouring, so voluptuous the design. The bronze statues belong to a higher school, and are many of them copies of fine Greek work. The casting betrays the skilled handiwork of finished artists-if not Greek, at least trained in that

Greek school whose success leaves far behind the efforts of the modern world. Marble beneath their touch assumes the firmness, the softness, the delicacy of flesh. It all but breathes, as who that has contemplated the mutilated torso of the Psyche in the collection of Naples will ever deny? with that never-to-beforgotten face, so full of piteous suffering for she is bearing the chastisement of Jove for the indulgence of her fatal curiosity; while the golden tone the antique marble acquires, gives a sort of lustrous finish to this pure masterpiece which is indescribable. Here, too, the Venus of Capua stands in close rivalry with her of Milo. The arms have been restored. The pose is similar, and also the treatment of the drapery. All that is loveliest in human mould is here arrested in marble, and smiles upon us with an immortal beauty, which "time cannot wither, nor custom stale." Beside her Antinöus looks down in his sullen beauty, Narcissus smiles from amid his clustering locks; his full eyelids, his broad low brow, the rich mould of his ideal proportions, remind us of the type selected by great painters for the embodiment of the angelic form. And then from these forms of matchless loveliness we turn to the really worshipped idol, the Diana, to wit, of Ephesus, "whom all Asia and the world" reverenced; the feet placed close together; the mummied form, the attributes of fertility, alike barbarous in feeling and representation, give us, nevertheless, the prototype of the formless and hideous idol, adored as Venus at Paphos, and point us to Egypt as the veritable mother of all the "Gods of Greece." Long was it indeed before these frightful and shapeless forms developed into the beauteous forms of the Periclean age of perfect youth, clad in perfect beauty, dazzling, strong, ideal; such as that Apollo of the shining bow who greets us in the Vatican, and that Venus of the Tribune who smiles at Florence, and that Diana, bright and lightsome, of the Louvre; while all the popular cult centred around the fond representations of the earlier idol, with that curious veneration which is still, in the Roman Church, reserved for some blackened image of saint or virgin, the more antique and frightful the better. Of the household plenishing, utensils, and furniture, preserved in profusion from the houses of Pompeii, it can only be said that, in beauty of design and excellence of execution displayed in the meanest articles of daily use, they far surpass any we have to show. Nor is there anything wanting to the thorough and complete furnishing of a first-rate house. The beds, seats, and tables-chiefly of marble or