CHAPTER IX

VESUVIUS AND THE CITIES WHICH HE HAS DESTROYED--HERCULANEUM, POMPEII, AND STABIÆ

It is to most strangers approaching Naples for the first time a matter of surprise to discover that Vesuvius has two peaks rising out of the same base, and that far removed from all the range of Apennines which, dim and distant, hedge in the wide fertile plain.

When viewed from Naples, Monte Somma, the landward peak, appears scarcely less conical than its neighbour, which contains the crater; but from the other side it has a wholly different aspect, and if one looks at it from the Sorrento cliffs one perceives that it is no peak, but a long ridge, the segment of a circle which, if completed, would enfold the present eruptive cone.

The fact is important, for not only is it the key to all the topography of the mountain, but it is essential to the comprehension of what happened on that August day of the year 79 A.D., when the dead volcano woke to life. The broken circle of Monte Somma was complete in those days; and men looking up from Pompeii or Herculaneum saw a mountain vastly different from that which we behold, yet one which, from the part before us, can be reconstructed by an easy use of the imagination.

If a man will take his stand on the lower heights of the hills behind Castellammare, he will find that he looks over Pompeii, over Bosco Reale lying on the first slopes which swell upward from the plain, into the mouth of the gap which parts Vesuvius from Somma. Even from that distance he will obtain a forcible impression of the black cliff of Somma, towering almost sheer to the height of a thousand feet above the bottom of the gap, while the outer face of the same rock wall slopes towards the sunny plain and the woods of Ottajano with an incline so gentle as to be comparatively easy of ascent.

Clearly the two faces of Somma have been differently formed. The sheer one was, at least in part, the actual wall of the prehistoric crater, that caldron in which the volcanic forces raged in days so ancient that they had been clean forgotten when the Romans ruled the land. The present cone did not exist. The circuit of Monte Somma was unbroken, and lay clothed with green meadows up to the very summit. But where, then, is the rest of that gigantic wall? It was blown away by the eruption that destroyed Pompeii.

This is the first tremendous fact which the visitor to Naples has to realise; and it is well worth while to absorb it thoroughly before setting foot upon the mountain, for nothing else seen there carries with it the same impression of overwhelming, cataclysmal awe. It is from a distance that the terror of the thing can be appreciated best. When one goes forward from the observatory on the mountain-side, skirting the flank of the eruptive cone, into that portion of the gap which is called the Atrio del Cavallo--though it would at certain times be found as safe to stable a steed in the Kelpie's flow as in this wilderness of burnt rock--the sight of the steep wall towering on one's left is infinitely striking. But at so close a distance, and in the immediate neighbourhood of so many other sights, it is scarcely possible to concentrate one's thoughts on the girth of the ancient crater. To comprehend the extent of the wall which has been blown away one must go further off, till one can distinguish the shape of Somma's wall, till one's eye can measure the vast size of the crater which would be formed by its completion, even allowing for the doubts which have been raised whether the circuit could have been so vast as this measurement would imply. There are some shattered fragments of the wall to be seen upon the south or seaward side of the volcano. The ridge where the white observatory building stands is one; another, named the "pedementina," appears as a shoulder of the mountain, clearly distinguishable from Naples. But these scattered remnants help little towards the general impression. It is by contemplating Somma that one learns to comprehend the appalling nature of the convulsion which, with little warning, blasted away so immense a portion of the mountain regarded by those who dwelt beneath it as one of the eternal hills.

Far from having any title to immortality Vesuvius is among the youngest and most mutable of mountains. The present cone is, as I said, the creation of the last eighteen centuries, piled up by successive eruptions to something more than the height of Somma, which once, as its name implies, towered far above it. Even though the antiquity of the mountain be reckoned by the age of Somma, or of some earlier cone, on the ruins of which Somma may have reared itself, it is as nothing when set beside the great wall of mountains which sweeps round the plain and ends in the great crags of St. Angelo and the cliffs of Capri. Those hills may be termed "eternal" by as true a warrant as any on the earth. But long after they were shaped and fashioned the sea flowed over the Campagna Felice and the site of Naples. Vesuvius was a volcanic vent-hole underneath the water, like many another which now seethes and hisses deep down in the blue bay, forming lava reefs about which the best fish always cluster. Then came the upheaval of the sea floor, and Vesuvius stood on dry land, no longer a sea-drenched reef or islet, but a hill of ashes and of lava piled over a crack in the earth's crust, which belched forth fiery torrents for unnumbered years, and sank at last to rest after an outburst which, if one may judge by the hugeness of the crater it scooped out, must have been terrible almost beyond conception.

Yet it was completely forgotten! How many centuries of rest must it not have needed to erase from the minds of men all memory of a cataclysm so tremendous! In the days when doom was drawing near to the cities of the Campagna, an old tradition was current that fire had once been seen coming out of the summit of Vesuvius. Doubtless many people looking up at the green mountain pastures shrugged their shoulders at the tale. Yet Strabo, the geographer, remarked that the rocks upon the surface of the mountain looked as if they had been subjected to fire. It is difficult for us to detach the idea of terror from Vesuvius, and to contemplate it with thoughts at all resembling those which the dwellers in the buried cities bestowed upon it. There has, however, been one period when the summit of the mountain presented an aspect probably not far unlike that which a Pompeiian would have seen, had curiosity led him to the top after visiting his vineyards or his pastures on the lower slopes. That time was in the years immediately preceding the eruption of 1631. Vesuvius had been almost at rest for near five centuries, and there were many who believed its fires to be extinct.

The Abate Braccini ascended the mountain in 1612, nineteen years before the outbreak. Vesuvius was then, as it is now, somewhat higher than Somma, though the comparative level has been changed more than once in the last three centuries. On the summit Braccini found a profound chasm, a mile in circuit, surrounded by a bulwark of calcined stones, on which no vegetation grew. Having crossed it, he descended to a little plain, where he found plants of divers kinds, though in no profusion. But from that point there was a gulf of verdure. One could descend it by tortuous paths, which led to the very bottom of the abyss, and were used not only by woodcutters plying their trade among the dense forest trees which had grown up to maturity on the lava soil, but also by animals which strayed down to browse on the succulent, rich grass. Neither men nor cattle retained any fear of the green crater depths. Only the rim of calcined stones at the summit seems to have betrayed the volcanic fire of old days, except that here and there a wreath of smoke coiled away across the elms and oaks and the pleasant scrub of broom and other underwood.

About the same time a Neapolitan descended to the bottom of the crater. He found there a flat plain with two small lakes, the crater walls all pierced with caverns, through some of which the wind whistled with a noise which sounded awfully on that dim, lonely spot. There were tales of treasure hidden in the caves, but no man had dared explore them. The crater was so deep that the descent and ascent occupied three hours.

Such was the aspect of the mountain in days when it had certainly rested for a shorter space than in the great age of Pompeii and Herculaneum. All men must have known what none remembered in either of those doomed cities. The tales of terror spreading from the mountain were still fresh, yet they inspired no more fear than there is in Ischia to-day of Monte Epomeo; and the herdsmen sat and whistled all day long upon the slopes as they do now within an hour's climb of Casamicciola.

To this false security must be ascribed the fact that those who dwelt about the mountain paid little heed to the indications of an approaching break in its long rest. Profound changes were taking place within the abyss which Braccini has described; and on the 1st or 2nd of December, 1631, an inhabitant of Ottajano, visiting the summit, found the woods gone, the chasm filled up to the brim. A level plain had replaced the yawning gulf. The bold Ottajanese walked across from one side to the other, surprised, no doubt, to see what had occurred, but, so far as we can judge from Braccini's narrative, by no means afflicted with any sense of awe at the magnitude of the event, still less inclined to see in it a foretaste of danger for the country.

A few nights later the peasants of Torre del Greco and of Massa di Somma began to complain that the growlings of the demons confined within the mountain disturbed their rest. Religious ceremonies were carried out, but the growls continued. On the night of the 15th, the air being extraordinarily clear, there hung in the sky above the mountain a star of strange size and brilliance. Dusk fell upon that day, and still there was no alarm; but somewhat later in the evening, a servant crossing the Ponte della Maddalena, on his way home from Portici, saw a flash of lightning strike the mountain; while at Resina a deep red glow appearing on the summit perplexed the villagers, for no such sight had been seen within the memory of living man.

As night passed and day approached, the reports of those who had ventured up the slopes grew more awful. Peasants between Torre del Greco and Torre dell'Annunziata had seen smoke pour in volumes out of the Atrio del Cavallo. A herdsman on the mountain saw the pastures rent, and the sweet herbage turned into a raging blast furnace. Santolo di Simone ventured some way up to ascertain the truth. He saw the ground cleft in divers places, out of which poured smoke and flame, while all the air was filled with thunderous reports, and great stones cast out of the fiery gulfs were hurled about the slopes. Meantime dawn in Naples was at hand; and as the light increased, men going about the common affairs of their existence began to take note of an extraordinary cloud which hung above Vesuvius, having the precise shape of a gigantic pine tree. Some wondered and some feared, but none understood what was the terror which had come upon them, till Braccini, going into his library and taking down his Pliny, read them that vivid passage which describes the sight young Pliny saw when he looked towards Vesuvius from Misenum. "There," said Braccini, as he closed the book, "there, in the words of sixteen centuries ago, is depicted what you see to-day."

That pine tree has become awfully familiar to most Neapolitans now alive; and to some of those who visit the city during an eruption it seems as if familiarity had bred contempt, and caused the occasion to be regarded as one for merriment, since it draws strangers there in countless numbers, and enriches every trader on the coast. But there is terror also in the streets when the shocks come rapidly, when doors and windows rattle with continuous concussions, and all the city reeks with sulphurous stenches coming one knows not whence. To this natural and human fear there was added, in the days of which Braccini wrote, the shock of a horrible surprise. The people were not dreaming of eruptions. They thought of them as little as did their far-distant kinsmen, who occupied the lovely shore when Pompeii was a city of the quick, not of the dead. That is what makes Braccini's tale so interesting. It reproduces for us, as nearly as is possible, a picture of what must have happened in the city streets on that morning when Pliny came sailing from Misenum at the urgent cry of Herculaneum for help, only to find his ships beaten off the coast by a hail of fiery stones.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Naples was at Torre del Greco on that fateful morning. He hurried back to the city, and having celebrated the Sacrament, and given orders for the rite to be solemnised throughout the city, he went up to the treasury where the relics of the saints were kept, intending to arrange a solemn procession. The blood of San Gennaro was found already liquefied and boiling! Great crowds accompanied the procession, the superstitious Neapolitans turned to their priests and saints at the first sign of danger, and marched behind the relics with effusion of piety, the men scourging themselves till the blood ran from their shoulders, the women dishevelled and weeping, while crowds of boys chanted the Litany with extraordinary tenderness. The shops were shut. Naples had become a city of devotees.

But San Gennaro, though his blood had boiled, was not ready to disperse the peril. The shocks of earthquake grew louder. The concussions rattled faster from the mountain. Towards noon thick darkness stole down upon the city, as it had upon Misenum sixteen hundred years before. The smell of sulphur in the streets was choking. Men asked themselves if so strong a reek could possibly travel from Vesuvius, and whether some vent had not opened close at hand. The houses, says Braccini, were swaying like ships at sea, and in the air there was a horrible roaring sound like the blast of many furnaces. The darkness grew more dense, and tongues of lightning flashed continuously out of the mirk sky. The crashes became quite appalling. Naples went wild with terror. The Viceroy sent drummers round the city appealing to the people to live cleanly in that which appeared to be the supreme moment of the created world. Men and women utterly unknown to each other ran up and embraced, seeking comfort, and crying, "Gesù, misericordia !"

So passed the first day of the reawakened activity of Vesuvius. The night brought no abatement of terror. Early in the morning the crashes redoubled. The whole mountain seemed to be springing into the air, and all the surface of the earth rocked like water in a vessel which is violently shaken. At the same moment the sea retreated for near half a mile, and then swept back to a point far above its level. At Naples nothing more than that was seen, but the miserable inhabitants of Resina perceived that those mighty birth throes had ended in the ejection of a vast flood of lava, which was pouring down the mountain on the seaward side. The fiery torrent came on with such speed that it had reached the sea in less than an hour from the outbreak. As it advanced it split into seven streams, each one of which took a different course of devastation. One flowed in the direction of San Jorio, which it destroyed, engulfing, it is said, no less than three thousand persons, including a religious procession. A second arm of the flood destroyed Bosco Reale and Torre dell'Annunziata, running out more than two hundred yards into the sea, where it formed a reef so hot that the water round about it boiled for days. A third wrecked Torre del Greco, a fourth poured over Resina, and a fifth, passing westwards, ruined San Giorgio a Cremano, and touched Barra and San Giovanni. Meantime a sixth stream, after filling the valleys divided by the ridge on which the observatory stands now, swept down on Massa di Somma, and reached San Sebastiano.

In this point the eruption of 1631 differed from that which destroyed Pompeii. In the latter there was no lava, but only falling stone and ash, either dry, or compacted into mud by storms of rain and showers of water thrown out of the crater. But it was not by lava only that the country was devastated three centuries and a half ago. Ashes fell also in such masses that near Vesuvius they were heaped up twelve feet deep, and great quantities of them drifting across southern Italy fell upon the shores of that lovely bay where Taranto looks across to the snow-topped mountains of Calabria. Stones fell also of astounding weight. One which was thrown into Massa di Somma is reported to have weighed 50,000 pounds; while another, which fell as far away as Nola, was of such dimensions that a team of twenty oxen could not stir it.

When this great eruption ended, the relative heights of Vesuvius and Somma were reversed, and the eruptive cone, which had risen 50 feet above its neighbour, stood nearly 200 feet below it. It is almost the rule that in great eruptions Vesuvius suffers loss of height, while the cone is piled up by smaller ones.

Such is the country in which a teeming population elects to live. It is said that no less than 80,000 persons have their homes on the slopes of the mountain--a fact which appears inexplicable to those who do not know by experience how small the loss of life may be in the greatest eruption. It is true that in 1631 a vast number of persons perished. But this was due probably in some measure to the fact that they did not know their danger and took no proper measures to avoid it. The men then living had seen nothing like the sudden peril which beset them. But every peasant of our day is well aware what lava floods may do, and how their course will lie. All have their little images of San Gennaro, which they set up in their cottages, and many can tell how the good saint has averted from his vineyard a fiery torrent which crawled on to the point when it seemed as if not even heavenly power could avert destruction, yet twisted off to one side and left him scatheless. At times, of course, the velocity of the lava is so great that no man can do aught but flee. In 1766 Sir William Hamilton saw a stream which ran in the first mile with a velocity "equal to that of the River Severn at the passage near Bristol," while in 1794 the lava ran through Torre del Greco at the rate of one foot in a second. Yet the loss of life was small. "Napoli fa i peccati," say the people, "e Torre li paga !"--Naples commits the sins and Torre pays for them. It is true enough; yet the toll is taken more in property than life. Moreover, the after-fruits of an eruption are worth rubies to the people, so fertile is the soil created by the decaying lava.

That the loss of life remains so small is the more surprising in view of the fact that Vesuvius can by no means be trusted to discharge itself on all occasions by the main crater. In fact, the flanks of the mountain, strengthened and compacted as they are by the outflow of countless lava streams, are yet seamed and fissured by the rupture of the surface to form other vents. Occasionally these "bocche" mouths, as the Italians call them, have opened far down the slopes among the cultivated fields and vineyards. It was so in 1861, not fortunately one of the greatest of eruptions. The bocche of that year are on the hillside no great way above Torre del Greco. Nothing, in fact, is certain about the operation of volcanic forces, and this is a fact which may be borne in mind by those who elect to ascend the mountain during an eruption. Sir William Hamilton in 1767 had a narrow escape. "I was making my observations," he says, "upon the lava, which had already from the spot where it first broke out reached the valley"--that is, the Atrio del Cavallo--"when on a sudden, about noon, I heard a violent noise within the mountain, and at a spot about a quarter of a mile off the place where I stood, the mountain split, and with much noise from this new mouth a fountain of liquid fire shot up many feet high, and then like a torrent rolled on directly towards us. The earth shook, and at the same time a volley of stones fell thick upon us; in an instant clouds of black smoke and ashes caused almost a total darkness; the explosions from the top of the mountain were much louder than any thunder I ever heard, and the smell of the sulphur was very offensive. My guide, alarmed, took to his heels; and I must confess I was not at my ease. I followed close, and we ran near three miles without stopping."

To run three miles over the broken and uneven lava reefs of the Piano, with a fiery torrent hunting close behind, is not an experience which would be relished by the ordinary tourist, however far it might be sweetened in the retrospect to the adventurous man of science. Yet happy is the man who in such a case gets off with a sharp run. In 1872 a party of tourists were less happy. The terrible eruption of that year deserves attention, being certainly the greatest within the present generation, and fortunately it has been described with knowledge and precision by Professor Palmieri who, with noble devotion to the cause of science, had spent so many years in the observatory planted on the barren ridge of trachyte which divides the two valley-arms which the Atrio del Cavallo projects towards Naples. Those valleys receive the streams of lava which are ejected into the Atrio, and when the volume of the flow is large, it has happened that the observatory has been almost engirdled with the red-hot torrents--a position of which, if the danger may be exaggerated, the awe certainly cannot, and which must fill all men with admiration for the illustrious scientists who endure it.

Palmieri regarded the eruption as the last phase of a series of disturbances which began at the end of January, 1871. From November, 1868, until the end of December, 1870, the mountain had been almost quiet. Only a few fumaroles discharging smoke bore witness to the need for watchfulness. "Early in 1871 the delicate instruments of the observatory which register earth tremors were observed to be slightly agitated, and the crater discharged a few incandescent projectiles, detonating at the same time, but not remarkably. On the 13th of January an aperture appeared on the northern edge of the upper plain of the Vesuvian cone; at first a little lava issued from it, then a small cone arose which threw out incandescent projectiles and much smoke of a reddish colour, whilst the central crater continued to detonate more loudly and frequently. The lava flow continued to increase until the beginning of March, without extending much beyond the base of the cone, although it had great mobility. In March the little cone appeared not only to subside but even partly to give way, as almost always happens with eccentric cones when their activity is at an end.... A little smoke issued from the small crater, and a loud hissing from the interior was audible. By lying along the edge I could see a cavity of cylindrical form about ten metres deep.... The bottom of the crater was level, but in the centre a small cone of about two metres had formed, pointed in such a manner that it possessed but a very narrow opening at the apex, from which smoke issued with a hissing sound, and from which were spurted a few very small incandescent stones and scoriæ. This little cone increased in size as well as in activity until it filled the crater and rose four or five metres above the brim. New and more abundant lavas appeared near the base of this cone, and pouring continually into the 'Atrio del Cavallo' rushed into the 'Fossa della Vetrana' in the direction of the observatory, and towards the Crocella, where they accumulated to such an extent as to cover the hillside for a distance of about three hundred metres.... For many months the lava descended from the cone and traversed the 'Atrio del Cavallo.'... On the 3rd and 4th of November a copious and splendid stream coursed down the principal cone on its western side, but was soon exhausted. The new small cone appeared again at rest, but did not cease to emit smoke...."

In the beginning of January, 1872, the little cone again became active, the crater of the preceding October resumed strength, there were bellowings, projectiles, and copious outflows of lava. In February the action of the hidden forces abated somewhat; but in March, at the full moon, the cone opened on the north-western side, the cleavage being marked out by a line of fumaroles, and a lava stream issued from the lowest part without any noise and with very little smoke, pouring down into the Atrio del Cavallo as far as the precipices of Monte Somma. This lava ceased flowing after a week, but the fumaroles still pointed out the clefts, and between the small re-made cone and the central crater a new crater of small dimensions and interrupted activity opened. On the 23rd of April, another full moon, the observatory instruments were agitated, the activity of the craters increased, and on the evening of the 24th splendid lavas descended the cone in many directions. The spectacle was of superb beauty. There was clear moonshine, and from Naples the outline of a vast fiery tree was seen to be traced on the black side of the mountain. Strangers poured into the city. The long period of activity without destruction disposed them to regard the show as a display of fireworks. Half Naples set its heart on ascending the mountain by night, and little wonder, for the moonlit bay reddened by the wide reflection from the burning breast of the volcano made a sight on which no man could look without the sense of witnessing a thing which was absolutely unearthly in the splendour of its beauty.

But on the following morning the flow was nearly spent. One stream only continued to flow from the base of the cone. And this one was almost inaccessible, by reason of the roughness of the ground. As night fell the visitors began to arrive. No less than 120 carriages are said to have passed the hermitage by dusk. Palmieri tried to dissuade the sightseers from going on, but in vain. The display of the previous night had been too splendid. They hoped continually that the show might be repeated. It was, but in a manner which they little looked for.

The crater was casting out huge stones, with detonations resembling the discharge of whole parks of artillery at once. From time to time the din ceased absolutely, then low and softly it began again, and gained force quickly till it crashed as loudly as before. When midnight was past, immense clouds of smoke began to pour out of all the craters, and lava broke out simultaneously from many points upon the slopes. Out of the chief crater rose the awful pine tree. The detonations grew more constant. There was still time to flee; but the spectacle was growing grander every moment, and inexperienced guides led forward a large party into the Atrio, where they stood watching such a sight as living men have rarely seen. At half-past three came the catastrophe. The whole of the great cone rent itself from top to bottom with an appalling crash, casting out a huge stream of fiery lava. At the same moment two large craters formed upon the summit, discharging showers of red-hot scoriæ, while the pillar of the pine tree rose up to many times more than even the vast height which it then stretched across the sky. A cloud of choking blinding smoke enveloped the visitors, a fiery hail rained down on them, the lava broke out immediately by them, and barred their retreat to the observatory. Eight medical students were engulfed by the fire, with others who were not known. Eleven more were grievously injured; and when the survivors were able to reach the observatory, it was in several cases but to die.

The lava flow from this grand fissure was restrained for some time within the Atrio; but issuing thence at last divided, one branch threatening Resina, but stopping happily almost as soon as it reached the cultivated ground, while the larger branch ran through the Fossa della Vetrana, traversing its whole length of 1,300 metres in three hours. It dashed into the Fossa della Faraone, then again divided, one arm of the diminished stream destroying a great part of the villages of Massa and San Sebastiano, and flowing on so far in the direction of Naples that had it continued but for four-and-twenty hours longer it must have flowed into the city streets.

It may be supposed that whilst this awful eruption was proceeding, the position of the courageous men of science in the observatory was rather glorious than safe. Nothing can exceed the value of the services rendered to science by these gentlemen who elect to spend their lives upon a spot which is always dreary and exposed to constant danger. They are of the outposts of mankind. I take my cap off to their stout hearts and their keen intellects. To them their danger is a little thing, and they would not thank me if I were to dwell too long on it. But I will take Professor Palmieri's own words, and beg those who read to ponder over what is involved in them. "On the night of the 26th of April the observatory lay between two torrents of fire. The heat was insufferable. The glass of the windows was hot and crackling, especially on the side of the Fossa della Vetrana. In all the rooms there was a smell of scorching."

Meantime the spectacle of the mountain must have been bewilderingly grand. The cone was seamed and perforated on every side, and the fiery lava issuing from the vents covered it so completely that, in Palmieri's picturesque expression, Vesuvius "sweated fire." On the 27th of April the igneous period of the eruption was over, though the rain of ashes and projectiles became more abundant, the crashes were louder than ever, the pine tree was of a darker colour, and was continually furrowed by flashes of lightning; while on the 29th stones fell at the observatory of such size that the glass of the unshuttered windows was broken. By midnight, of that day, however, there was a marked improvement, and on the 1st of May the eruption was at an end.

* * * * *

The visitor who strolls to-day through the main street of Portici sees nothing but a continuation of the squalid life and poverty of building which have followed him continuously from the eastern quarters of the city. The mean aspect of the town is unexpected. One had not looked for any striving after the dream of classical beauty, once so frequent and so great upon the Campanian shore. But this was the chosen pleasure resort of the Bourbon kings; and some greater dignity might have been expected in the close neighbourhood of a palace.

The palace is there still. The noisy street runs through its courtyard. Poor deserted palace! It has lost its royalty of aspect, and for all one sees in passing by the discoloured walls and shuttered windows it might be any poverty-stricken crowded palazzo in Naples. But turn in beneath the archway on the right, and go by the large cool staircase, across the clanking stones, until you emerge into the hot spring sun again. There is a noble semicircular expanse, flanked on either hand by a terrace, adorned with busts and vases, and with stairs descending to the garden, which stretches down to a belt of pine trees, cut away a little in the centre to reveal that band of heavenly blue which is the sea. The young trees standing by the pine are in fresh leaf; the grass is full of poppies; white butterflies are skimming to and fro across it; all is silent and deserted. A bare-armed stable-boy comes out to train a skinny pony round the terrace. The stucco of the walls is peeling off; the long rows of windows are shuttered; the sentry boxes stand empty. It is forty years since any courtier came out to taste the evening freshness on this spot where Sir William Hamilton talked of the wonders of the buried cities so long and eagerly that he forgot to watch the wife and friend whose sins the world forbears to reckon when it remembers the beauty of the one and the valour and wisdom of the other.

It is but a little way beyond the palace to the spot where the Prince d'Elboeuf is said, while sinking a well in the year 1709, to have chanced on things of which he did not know the meaning. This is one of the fables which demonstrate the extreme difficulty of speaking the truth, even about important and world-famous matters. Nothing is more certain than that the prince sank his "well" with the hope and intention of drawing up not water, but antiquities. The fact is, that in the year just mentioned he bought a country house, which stood near the site of the present railway station. It was perfectly well known that Herculaneum lay buried underneath Portici or Resina, and the prince began excavating of set purpose. It was mere chance which guided him to a spot where his first shaft came right down on the benches of the theatre, thus letting in to Herculaneum the first gleam of daylight which had entered there for more than sixteen centuries. Not much more than that stray glimmer has enlightened the old academic city even now; for none of the energy and learned patience lavished daily on Pompeii has been expended here.

Herculaneum as it lies to-day, awaiting its turn for excavation, creates in one respect an impression which Pompeii excites in a far less degree. It retains the visible aspect of a buried city. The sense of overwhelming tragedy is never lost. Pompeii stands free and open under the clear sky; so large, so perfect, that in the fascination of its archæology one is somewhat led away from the disaster. It is a deserted city. One knows what it was that drove the people out, but it is easy to forget. Perhaps one cares more to gloat over the rich old life laid bare so freely than to burden one's mind with memory of that day when the glow of August sunshine turned to darkness "as of a room shut up," and death came down from the mountain into the crowded streets.

At Herculaneum the mere fragment of a street, the few half-buried houses, the pit in which they lie, the cavernous darkness which hides the amphitheatre, stimulate the imagination till it leaps to a sudden comprehension of what it was that happened on that day of woe. One passes from the dirty street of Resina into a building of no dignity, somewhat like the entrance to the public baths of some small English town. A guide appears and guides one down a flight of steps which are at first palpably modern. But ere long the tread changes. One is on an ancient stair, and almost immediately the guide pauses in a vaulted corridor running right and left through perfect darkness. The height is hardly more than permits a tall man to walk upright. Here and there an arched opening in the corridor goes one sees not whither. Passing under such an arch one may descend four steps, beyond which rises another wall. That wall is tufa; it is no part of the structure. It flowed or fell here when it was half liquid; it came out from Vesuvius, and it is what overwhelmed the city.

The steps, thus interrupted by the intrusion of what are now stone walls, are the upper tier of seats in the amphitheatre. A gleam of daylight breaks the darkness: it comes from the Prince d'Elboeuf's shaft, which pierces the stone steps and goes down far below them. One looks up the tubular wet boring and then plunges forward to the bottom of the theatre through blackness barely scattered by the candles which the guide carries.

A short descent of nineteen steps in all brings one to the floor of the theatre, at the spot appropriated to the orchestra. The stage is a low platform, approached on either hand by steps. It is deprived of some part of its original depth by pillars and barriers hardened out of that choking mud which poured down from the mountain. Such barriers present themselves on every side; they leave the theatre formless; they create gangways where none existed, walls where the spectators had clear line of vision, darkness where the sun shone freely eighteen centuries ago. In one of these gangways behind the stage the clear impression of human features looks down from the rough wet ceiling; it is the impression of a player's mask. There were doubtless many in the theatre when the seething flood rolled in.

Among this darkness and these sights the sense of tragedy tightens on the imagination. The cruelty of the ruin stands before one and is not to be set aside. There are remains of frescoes here and there; but they are almost destroyed, and serve only to increase the pity that a theatre which once rang with laughter and glowed so richly with soft light and colour should lie wet, buried and forsaken in the darkness.

It is sometimes said that Herculaneum was destroyed by lava--the guides use the word to this day. But Vesuvius threw out no lava in the great eruption which destroyed the cities. It ejected much in prehistoric times. Pompeii itself is built upon a lava ridge, which in the old days was quarried for millstones, thus giving rise to an important industry. But in historic times lava did not flow--if we may trust geologists--till the year 1036 A.D.

Herculaneum was destroyed by fragments of pumice stone and ashes, scarcely distinguishable from those which one may see raked away from the half-uncovered walls of some new house at Pompeii. With this storm of falling cinders--how dense and thick one may picture dimly by remembering once more that all the seaward wall of the vast old crater was being blown away--with this crushing, choking shower, came torrents of rain, enough to turn the falling ashes to a sort of mud, which hardened into tufa. Indeed, just as the yellow tufa of Posilipo is composed of volcanic ash ejected underneath the sea, and is thus formed of ash and water, such precisely is the crust which hardened over Herculaneum, and holds the city in its clutch unto this hour. Perhaps the mud formed on the mountain slopes, and came rolling down upon the town. Professor Phillips thought it formed within the crater. Some obvious warning of great peril there must have been, and that quite early on the fatal 24th of August; for it was not long past noon when a message reached Pliny at Misenum, begging for his ships, since escape was even then impossible except by sea. Already Pliny, looking from Misenum, saw the mountain topped by that vast and awful cloud shaped like a pine tree, out of which ashes were raining down on the three cities. His ships, approaching the coast towards evening, ran into a hail of pumice stone. The ashes fell hotter and hotter on the decks, and in continually larger masses. The sea ebbed suddenly. Ruins were tumbling from the mountain. There was no possibility of giving help to the doomed city, and Pliny gave orders to steer off the coast. No eye has seen Herculaneum from that day to this. What became of the citizens is not known. Comparatively few bodies have been found; but the excavations were too imperfect to prove that somewhere in the city bounds they do not lie in heaps.

Such was the end of Herculaneum, by ashes, not by lava. It is true that lava beds lie above the city now. Probably the lava of 1631 passed over it. Sir William Hamilton distinguished the débris of no less than six eruptions besides that which destroyed it. Sir Charles Lyell also thought that a large part of the covering of the city was subsequent to its first destruction.

At Herculaneum all that is most interesting lies underground, and nearly all is still invisible. But little effort has been made at any time to disinter the city. The searchers who dug there at the command of Charles of Bourbon between the years 1750 and 1761--to which period we must refer nearly all the most precious discoveries--contented themselves with sinking shafts in likely spots, from which they mined and tunnelled as far as seemed possible to them, and then filled up the shaft again and sank another. Thus the notices of what they found, and still more of how they found it, are imperfect. They have, moreover, been carelessly preserved. Some were even wantonly destroyed in the last century by men who did not appreciate their value. Yet enough has been retained to stimulate the highest interest in Herculaneum, if not indeed to justify the belief that whenever it shall be possible to overcome the obvious difficulties of excavation, treasures will be found which may far exceed in quantity and beauty those which Pompeii has yielded.

This will be better understood by considering what has been written by Signor Comparetti and Signor de Petra concerning a single villa of Herculaneum, now, alas! buried up once more in darkness. It stood between the "new diggings" and the royal palace of Portici. I will preface my abstract of the treatise of the two scholars by some passages taken from the letters of Camillo Paderni, director of the excavations, to Mr. Thomas Hollis, in 1754.

"This route," says Paderni, "led us towards a palace, which lay near the garden. But before they arrived at a palace they came to a square ... which was adorned throughout with columns of stucco. At the several angles of the square was a terminus of marble, and on every one of these stood a bust of bronze of Greek workmanship, one of which had on it the name of the artist. A small fountain was placed before each terminus, which was constructed in the following manner. Level with the pavement was a vase to receive the water which fell from above. In the middle of this vase was a stand of balustrade work, to support another marble vase. This second vase was square on the outside and circular within, where it had the appearance of a scallop shell; in the centre whereof was the spout which threw up the water that was supplied by leaden pipes within the balustrade. Among the columns ... were alternately placed a statue[1] of bronze and a bust of the same material, at the equal distance of a certain number of palms.... The statues taken out from April 15 to September 30 are in number seven, near the height of six Neapolitan palms, except one of them, which is much larger, and of excellent expression. This represents a faun lying down, who appears to be drunk, resting upon the goatskin in which they anciently put wine.... September 27.--I went myself to take out a head in bronze, which proved to be that of Seneca, and the finest that has hitherto appeared.... Our greatest hopes are from the palace itself, which is of a very large extent. As yet we have only entered into one room, the floor of which is formed of mosaic work, not inelegant. It appears to have been a library, adorned with presses inlaid with different sorts of wood, disposed in rows. I was buried in this spot more than twelve days, to carry off the volumes found there, many of which were so perished that it was impossible to remove them. Those which I took away amounted to the number of 337, all of them at present incapable of being opened. These are all in Greek characters. While I was busy in this work I observed a large bundle, which from the size I imagined must contain more than a single volume. I tried with the utmost care to get it out, but could not, from the damp and weight of it. However, I perceived that it consisted of about eighteen volumes.... They were wrapped about with the bark of a tree, and covered at each end with a piece of wood.

"November 27th.--We discovered the figure of an old faun, or rather a Silenus, represented as sitting on a bank, with a tiger lying on his left side, on which his hand rested. Both these figures served to adorn a fountain, and from the mouth of the tiger had flowed water. From the same spot were taken out, November 29th, three little boys of bronze of a good manner. Two of them are young fauns, having the horns and ears of a goat. They have likewise silver eyes, and each of them the goatskin on his shoulder, wherein anciently they put wine, and through which here the water issued. The third boy is also of bronze, has silver eyes, is of the same size with the two former, and in a standing posture like them, but is not a faun. On one side of this last stood a small column, upon the top of which was a comic mask that served as a capital to it and discharged water from its mouth. December 16th.--In the same place were discovered another boy with a mask and three other fauns.... Besides these we met with two little boys in bronze, somewhat less than the former. These likewise were in a standing posture, had silver eyes, and had each a vase upon his shoulder whence the water flowed. We also dug out an old faun, crowned with ivy, having a long beard, a hairy body, and sandals on his feet. He sat astride upon a goatskin, holding it at the feet with both his hands...."

Thus far Paderni; and I have made this long extract to little purpose if the reader has not already recognised some among the finest objects in the great museum at Naples. This villa, with its garden full of statues, its cool peristyle all humming with the plash of falling water, its shadowy colonnade sheltering the marvellous bronzes, must have been a place of wonderful beauty. He was a rare collector who dwelt there. He had twenty-three large bronze busts and eight small ones, thirteen large bronze statues and eighteen small ones. In his garden stood not less than nine marble statues, and of marble busts he had certainly seven and probably seven more. Among these not one is of mean workmanship. The greater part are famous all round the world for beauty. They are unsurpassed, and they all came from a single villa just beyond the walls of this buried city.

Who was the man who made himself a home so splendid? The style of the decorations points to the latter years of the Republic. It is in marked distinction from the more ornate style which prevailed under the Empire, and of great mythological pictures there was none. One thing only enables us to guess with something like assurance who among the patricians of those days owned the villa--namely the library. The mode of inference is curious.

It was no small library which was lifted by Paderni from the presses where it had lain for seventeen centuries. The papyri numbered 1,806, though by no means all were separate treatises, while some were mere scraps. All were charred and damaged to such a degree as to render their examination a work whose difficulty baffled many men of science. At length the task was accomplished by an ingenious arrangement of silk threads, which unfolded the papyrus upon a false back made partly of onion skins, and laid it open to investigation. The results are curious. Indeed, they are something more than curious; and making due allowance for the fact that wise men do not permit themselves to be ruffled by the tricksy mockeries of time, it must be admitted that the story of this library is exasperating.

All the world knows how small a space the treasures of Greek and Latin literature occupy upon our shelves compared with that which they would fill were they intact. What melancholy gaps! How much pure delight has not been reft from us! Where is the scholar who in moments of low spirits has not roamed round his library reckoning up his losses? Livy shorn of more than half his bulk, Terence mangled, Cicero lacking heaven knows how many of his finest compositions! Petrarch had the treatise of the great orator "De Gloria," but nobody has seen it since. It is a painful subject--the canker at the heart of learned men, the skeleton at the feasts of all academies.

So much the greater, then, was the joy when the news ran round Europe that a library, formed in the best age of Latin literature, was discovered at Herculaneum. Now, surely, some of the lost treasures would be restored! All the universities chuckled and stood on tiptoe. Humanity, with the help of a volcano, had scored a point against time at last.

But the rolls of papyri were sadly like mere lumps of charcoal. Paderni saw a letter here, a letter there, but on the whole could make nothing of them. The smile died on the faces of the scholars. The trick was not won yet. Who would unroll these charred manuscripts, and who could possibly read them when unrolled?

Many people tried and failed, Sir Humphry Davy among the number. Learned hearts sank, and hope flickered almost to extinction. At length Padre Piaggi invented an ingenious arrangement of silk threads, whereby the charred and brittle rolls were unwrapped in the manner described above. It was a slow and weary process, but the wit of man has devised no better. One by one the treasures of the past were read. It took a century and a half, but we know the contents of some three hundred and fifty of them now.

Broadly stated, the outcome of all the pother has been to restore to an unthankful world what is probably a complete set of the works of Philodemus! "Philodemus!" gasp the scholars. "Who wanted him?" A fifth-rate Greek philosopher and a fourth-rate poet, who lived at Rome in the days of Cicero, better esteemed for his verses than his reasoning, and not much for either. But no Livy? No Terence? No Cicero? Not one line; hardly anything but the prose treatises of Philodemus, concerning which Signor Comparetti observes with emphasis that the oblivion they lay in was anything but undeserved.

Such is the greatest practical joke played on us by the Time Spirit in the present age. But now, laying aside our disappointment and bad temper, let us see what can be made out of this curious, if worthless, discovery. Who could have cared to collect the works of Philodemus, large and small, even to the notes he made from other books? The philosophy was Epicurean, but the chief works of the leaders of that school are with few exceptions not there. Who could it be but Philodemus himself, the only man, surely, for whom such a collection would have value? But what, then, was the library doing in this splendid and costly villa at Herculaneum? Philodemus was a poor Greek scholar, the last man who could have afforded to collect fine marbles or to house them nobly. The villa must have belonged to his patron and protector. Cicero names for us the patrician who enjoyed the privilege of hearing Philodemus reason when he would. It was Piso, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cæsoninus, attacked by Cicero in one of the greatest of his orations. Piso had known this poor scholar from a boy, learnt the philosophy of Epicurus from him, and gave him rooms in his own house. To Piso, probably, belonged this villa. Here he may have ended his stormy life in the society of Philodemus; and when that learned man ascended to Parnassus, his books remained in what had been his study, preserved perhaps by some lingering attachment to his memory, perhaps by such a superstitious pride in what is never read as may be seen in certain country houses of to-day, where the squire believes the dusty volumes collected by his grandfather are a credit to the house, and chides the housemaid if he ever finds a cobweb on the peaceful shelves. It will also be remembered that, unless you want the space very much, it is easier to leave books alone than to destroy them. On the whole, I do not think the discovery of this library affords any evidence of the prevalence of cultivated taste in Herculaneum. Rather the opposite, indeed, for whatever value the owners of the house may have attached to the library the fact remains that they added to it nothing in the hundred years which followed the decease of Philodemus.

As for the statues and the bronzes, the finest were doubtless part of the spoils of Piso's proconsulate in Macedonia. Cicero taunted him with having stripped Greece of its treasures, as Verres ransacked those of Sicily. The conduct of both men was barbarous perhaps; but the candid visitor will look many times at the Sleeping Faun, or the Mercury in repose, before daring to ask himself whether he would have come home from Macedonia without them. If he discover that he would, he may yet find cause to rejoice that Piso was less virtuous; for a very short reflection on the state of Greece during the last twenty centuries suggests that if a moralist had been proconsul we should have lacked many pleasures which we now enjoy.

The "Scavi Nuovi" lie at a little distance from the theatre. One goes down a steep street sloping to the sea, the Vico di Mare. A gate in the wall gives admission to what seems at first a quarry, but a second glance shows one a short street of roofless houses, emerging from the hillside and running straight in the direction of the shore until stopped by the opposite bank. Beneath and behind these walls, bright with mesembryanthemums and wild roses, lies all the city save this little fragment, this portion of a street, this poor two dozen houses, with the remnants of four insulæ, of which three are occupied by private houses and the fourth by some rooms belonging to the baths, of which the greater part are buried still. The houses of the south-west insula are the most interesting. At the corner is a shop with marble counter, and close to that is a dwelling of rare beauty, the so-called "Casa d'Argo." At the door there are four pillars, and on either side a bench. Out of this entrance one passes through a larger room into the xystos, colonnaded on three sides. A row of rooms open from it, all frescoed in the architectural style of which we shall see much at Pompeii, and giving on the garden. Beyond these rooms there is a second peristyle, all very beautiful--clearly the dwelling of a man of taste and means.

But in all this there is no source of pleasure which cannot be enjoyed far better at Pompeii. It is there and not to Herculaneum that the traveller goes to see the results of excavation. On this spot, I say again, it is the tragedy that counts; and as I turn in the warm sunshine and look up the broken street, where rose bushes bloom profusely in the untended gardens and the brown lizards slip in and out among the cold and empty hearths, I see above the houses of the dirty modern town the huge cone of Vesuvius fronting me directly. So he stands, looking down upon the ruin he has made, while the long train of sulky smoke which stains the clear blueness of the April sky flaunts itself like a warning to mankind that it is vain to set human forces against his, and that what he wills to hide shall lie lost and hidden in the earth for ever.

A man willing to go on foot from Resina to Pompeii might find much to amuse him by the way, especially if he have any care for tracing out the ravages of eruptions. The seashore is not unpleasant. The lava reefs that fringe it are curious, and the ports of Torre del Greco and Torre dell'Annunziata have their share of interest and picturesqueness. But the crumbs of knowledge to be picked up during such a walk seem insignificant beside the banquet which lies waiting at Pompeii; and only those who have already tasted the last dish of that banquet will care to loiter on the way.

I do not propose to add one more to the countless unscholarly rhapsodies which have been produced by visitors to Pompeii. Certain tragic feelings strike every one who enters the old grey streets. They are too obvious to need description. All else belongs to the domain of the guide-book or of the expert--to the latter more than to the former, since the best of guide-books is a sorry companion to a man who has neglected the works of Helbig or August Mau. It is not to be expected that the detailed descriptions of Murray or of Gsell-Fels can supply the broad principles and the general ideas which would have been a constant delight if acquired in advance. Many of the best intellects in Europe have been engaged in estimating the significance of the objects found from day to day in Pompeii. It is in their works that knowledge should be sought; for there is scarce any subject on which so much has been written, both so badly and so well, as on this lost city of the Campanian Plain.

It is, as I have said already, by wandering up and down the Strada Tribunali in Naples that one may prepare oneself to picture what would have struck a stranger on first entering Pompeii. A man passing to-day beneath the vault of the Porta Marina sees a grey street, its house-fronts perfect, but empty, and startlingly silent. This street runs into the Forum, and is in easy hearing distance of the babel of noise which issued constantly from that centre of the city. Under the colonnade of the Forum tinkers mended pots with clatter and din of hammers. Women hawked fruit and vegetables up and down, chanting their praises doubtless as loudly as the "padulani" of to-day in Naples. Ladies met their shoemakers under the cool shadows of the great arcade; and there, too, children chased each other up and down, screaming at their games like any urchins of to-day upon the steps of San Giovanni Maggiore. We know it, for they are all depicted in paintings found in neighbouring houses. There is the seller of hot food with his caldron, not unlike the stall at which the workman stops to-day in the Piazza Cavour and pays a soldo to have his hunch of bread dipped into hot tomato broth. What cheerful sounds must have risen up from all these occupations! How shall one picture them, except in the streets of some other crowded city? On the left, abutting on the south-west angle of the Forum, is the Basilica, a broad hall used as an extension of the market-place, and containing at the rear the tribunals of justice; while at the opposite, or north-east corner of the Forum, is the market proper, the Macellum, where the fish were sold. Certainly they were brought in by this Porta Marina, far nearer to the shore in those days than now. The scales scraped off the fish in the Macellum were found there in great numbers. Close by were pens for living sheep and counters for the butchers. What a reek of odours, what a hum of eager voices, must have risen up from this dense quarter of the busy, active town! The Pompeiians traded with their very hearts. "Lucrum gaudium!" "Oh, joyous gain!" such were the exclamations which they painted on their walls. And gain they did! Transmitting over the seas the commerce from Nola and Nocera, trading doubtless with ships of Alexandria, as Pozzuoli did; harbouring at their piers upon the Sarno, round which a suburb had sprung up, galleys of many a seaport city, Greek or Barbarian, carrying the industries, and not a few among the vices of the East. Both found a ready welcome in this full-blooded city, intensely alive to all delights and interests, whether pure or impure. Venus was protectress of the city, and was worshipped without stint. There were some within the city whom loathing of its wickedness had impelled to prophecy, so at least one must infer from the fact that the words "Sodoma Gomora" are scratched in large letters on one of the house-fronts.

To whom in that pagan city could Hebrew history have suggested so apt and terrible a foreboding? A Jew, perhaps, of whom there were multitudes in Rome; even possibly a Christian, but there is scant evidence of that. Doubtless the Pompeiians read those words without comprehending their horrible significance, and went their way to theatre or to wineshop, a laughing people, a gay, light-hearted nation, a mixed race, the blood of Oscans and of Samnite mountaineers mingling with the languid graces of the degenerating Greeks, loving easily, forgetting lightly, careless, passionate, and intensely human.

Such was Pompeii, a seething, noisy, eager city, filled with the reek of dense humanity. But now it is swept clean by winds and sunlight. Its very stews are fragrant. In the morning sweet air blows in from the sea; at night it steals down no less sweetly from the mountains. In all the city there is not one stench. The freshness and the silence of the long streets weigh upon the nerves. There is so little evidence of ruin, not an ash left, not a bank of earth in all the wide district which one enters first, nothing to remind us by the evidence of sight what it was that drove out the people from these once crowded streets and left the houses and the colonnades open to the whispering sea wind.

It was not so before the great director Fiorelli came. He it was who stopped haphazard digging, and cleared each quarter completely before beginning work upon another. Since, then, his methods have in great measure freed the city already of its débris, and set its inanimate life before us as it was, the wiser part at Pompeii is to try to grasp the arrangements of a Roman city, leaving the necessary musings on the tragedy to be got through elsewhere.

It is beyond my scope, as I have said already, to assume the authority of an expert on Pompeii. More experts are not wanted. The lack, at least in England, is of readers for those who exist. A man intending a tour in Italy will lay out ungrudgingly ten pounds upon his travelling gear, but he will scout the idea of spending the price of a new hat-box on August Mau's treatise, _Pompeii, its Life and Art_, though it would increase his pleasure tenfold more. Still less will he buy any book in a foreign tongue. I must, therefore, in my unlearned way, set down some few facts which will with difficulty be discovered in the guide-books or from the guides. And firstly as to the houses.

It will occur to any man that a town so large as Pompeii must have been built in many fashions, old and new. New types grew popular, while old ones still persisted. There is no town in the world in which many manners cannot be traced. At Pompeii, where building was arrested eighteen hundred years ago, the changes of taste are plain and interesting. Indeed, while the houses all possess the atrium, that is the large square or oblong hall in front, open to the sky, with chambers surrounding it on every side, and most have also the peristyle, the colonnaded court behind; yet there are some which are built without the peristyle, and which by other points in their construction give witness of belonging to an earlier and simpler age.

One of these antique houses is easily found by passing through the Forum, across the Strada delle Terme and up the Strada Consolare, almost to the Herculaneum gate. It is called the House of the Surgeon; and as in all the city there is no other which retains so largely the aspect and arrangements of the earlier time, before Greek influence was paramount, it should certainly be visited first.

It appears at once on entering the house that the peristyle is lacking. One may stand within the courtyard of the atrium, and, looking through the house, see no such vista of colonnaded quadrangle, of fountains, busts, and splendid distances, as gratified the eye within the larger and more modern houses. Those beauties were the contribution of the Greeks to the old simple Latin life. This was the abode of a "laudator temporis acti," a lover of the old homely times, when the single courtyard of the atrium sufficed alike for the master, his family and clients, when the wife sat spinning with her maidens by the scanty light, as in Ovid's immortal description of Lucretia, and the slaves came and went about the household duties close at hand. A colonnade there is certainly, but of only one arcade, and giving on the garden. There was but little splendour in such a dwelling. Only when Greek influence destroyed the simplicity of earlier life was the family quarter distinguished from that of slaves and clients and relegated to the peristyle, the inner courtyard. There is no trace in the Surgeon's house of the rich ornament which became so popular in Pompeii, neither mosaics nor wall paintings. The very building stone differs from that used in later years; for the house is built of large square limestone blocks, while the immense majority of houses in the city are constructed of tufa, quarried chiefly from the ridge on which the city stands. All these facts mark the Surgeon's house as belonging to the earliest Pompeiian age of which traces still exist. It is certainly older than the year 200 B.C., and we may picture the city, while still untouched by the rare sense of beauty which was flowering in the Greek coast towns, as consisting largely of houses on this model, with others of a fashion older and more humble, of which we now know nothing.

From the House of the Surgeon it is but a little way to that of Sallust, a larger residence, and one of later date, when tufa had displaced limestone as a building material. It belongs, therefore, to the same period as the vast majority of houses in the city, yet in that period it is of the most antique, the work of a day when Greek influence was not yet paramount in architecture or in private life. It has no peristyle, if a late Roman addition be excepted; the family life was not yet divided. From the atrium one looked through to colonnade and garden, much as in the Surgeon's house. The only paintings are in imitation of slabs of marble on the walls.

To reach the House of the Faun we must return to the Strada delle Terme and follow it towards the north-east until it merges in the Strada della Fortuna, in which, upon the left, stands the once magnificent dwelling which takes its name from the beautiful bronze of the Dancing Faun now in the Naples museum. It is much to be wished that the treasures of this noble house could have been left in it. It may in part be older than the house of Sallust, though belonging like it to the Tufa period, and possessing the additional apartments prescribed by the influx of Greek taste. Indeed the added rooms, like all the other portions of the house, were planned with magnificence; and as there are two atria, so there are two peristyles, each of singular beauty and built in the purest taste. There is no house in Pompeii in which a man should pause so long, or to which he should come back so often; for this is the most perfect specimen of the best age of building in the city. It is the fruit of a long age of peace, during which the people drank in thirstily the exquisite sense of beauty diffused from the Greek coast towns. It is not difficult to understand how these rough townsmen, bred of sturdy mountaineers, and inheriting no tradition of fine culture, must have been affected when they went across the sea to Cumæ or to Pæstum, saw the austere glory of the temples rising near the shore, talked with the men whose brains schemed out that splendour and whose hands learnt how to fashion it, craftsmen who wrought nothing destitute of loveliness, whose coins were as noble as their temples, whose hearts must have been afire to spread more widely their own perception of line and form, and who were doubtless no less eager to teach than the Pompeiians were to learn. There is nothing in the world to-day comparable to the magic of that influence which spread like sunshine out of the Greek cities on the Campanian coast, no teachers so noble, no scholars so devoted and receptive, no people who surrender themselves so absolutely to the dominion of beauty, and will have it pure, and none but it.

Under the first passion of this enthusiasm Pompeii was transformed. Almost all the public buildings received their present shape from this wave of pure Greek art. Almost every one is graceful and lovely, the columns and architraves were white, the ornament not overloaded, the decorations simple. The artists who tinted the walls confined themselves to producing masses of colour. Wall pictures there were none; but the mosaics of the floors were wrought with curious beauty, and reproduced the first compositions of great painters. The House of the Faun is beautified by no wall pictures, but it contained on the floor of the room which divided the two peristyles one of the finest mosaics ever found, that which depicts the battle of Alexander the Great upon the Issos.

The stream of Greek influence ran pure for some four generations. After that it was contaminated. Man can keep no beauty in his hands for long unspoilt. The change is manifest in Pompeii. The Roman influence stole in. A muddy taste obscured the simple grace of the Greek lines, tortured the architecture, piled up unmeaning ornament, and degraded all the city. There were many stages between the first step and the last, not a few still beautiful, though the downward tendency is plain. The house of the Vettii is the finest of the later period. There one may see wall-paintings of rare charm, mingled with others of far inferior taste, as if the gallery of some fine connoisseur had fallen by mischance into the hands of men who did not understand its worth, and placed the compositions of degraded artists side by side with the masterpieces of an olden time.

Exact descriptions of these houses are the business of the guide-book. But there are certain observations which I think it necessary to make about the paintings--though if anyone would read the work of Helbig on the subject, it would be much better.

No one who visits Pompeii, no one who has seen in the most hasty way the collections of the Naples Museum, can fail to be impressed, first with the worth of the pictures, their dramatic force, their exquisite grace, their rich and tender fancy; and next by their vast profusion. What manner of city was this which worshipped art so devoutly that scarce a single house is without pictures more beautiful than any save a few collectors can obtain to-day? Helbig, writing more than twenty years ago, described and classified two thousand. Others perished on the walls where they were found. More still are being dug up day by day. No ancient writer has told us that Pompeii was renowned for the multitude of its paintings. The city bore almost certainly no such reputation. It was a provincial town of little note, remarkable for nothing in the eyes of those who visited it. Yet what a world of beauty must have existed on the earth when these were the common decorations of a fourth-rate town, excelled by those of Rome, or even Ostia, in proportion to the higher wealth and dignity of those imperial haunts! What were the decorations to be seen at Baiæ, when Pompeii was adorned so finely! That group of palaces must surely have drawn more noble craftsmen, and in greater numbers, than ever visited the town of trade and pleasure on the Sarno. As in a great museum we stand before the gigantic bone of some lost animal, striving to picture in our minds the creature as he lived, getting now a dim conception of great strength and bulk which is lost again by the weakness of our fancy ere half realised, so in presence of these pictures at Pompeii we are tormented by flashing visions of the grace and splendour of the ancient world which so many centuries ago was shattered into fragments, and which it may be that no human intellect will ever reconstruct before the earth grows cold and man fails from off its surface.

Whence came these pictures, these noble visions of Greek myth, austere and restrained, these warriors, these satyrs, these happy, laughing loves? Is it possible that one small city can have bred the artists who dreamed all these dreams and yet have left no mark in history of such great achievement? Clearly not. The artists cannot have been Pompeian. The elder Pliny tells us that in his day painting was at the point of death, while Petronius declares roundly that it was absolutely dead. One walks round the Naples Museum and recalls these judgments with astonishment. Can this art be really moribund, this Iphigenia, spreading her arms wide to receive the stroke, this Calchas, finger on lip, watching for the fated moment, this Perseus, this Ariadne! If this is dying art, Heaven grant that English art may ere long die of the same death.

But it is not. No man can judge it so. Pliny and Petronius meant something else, and the key to their despondency is produced by the discovery that many of these Pompeian pictures are replicas. The same subjects recur, with almost the same treatment. Sometimes the figures are identical. Sometimes the painter has elected to reduce the composition. The painting of Argos watching Io occurs four times in Pompeii. It has been found also in Rome!--the same picture, but containing figures which the Campanian artist thought proper to omit. There is evidence, too, that the picture was diffused over an area far wider than that lying between Rome and Pompeii. It appears on reliefs, on medals, and on cameos. Lucian had it in his mind when he wrote a famous passage in his poem, and it suggested an epigram by Antiphilos. The case is similar with the fresco of Perseus and Andromeda. Both were world-known pictures, the composition of a great artist--Helbig suggests that it was the Athenian Nikias--and both were copied far and wide by craftsmen who could merely reproduce.

This is what Pliny and Petronius meant. They looked about them and found only copyists. The great school of painting was dead, and those who reproduced its works did so without heart or understanding. This was sorrowful enough for them; but we may regard their woeful faces cheerfully. Time and the volcano have done us the good service of preserving to our day copies of some masterpieces of ancient painting. The copyists were often treacherous. There is a fresco of Medea at Pompeii in which the figure of the mother brooding over the thought of murdering her children is weak and unconvincing. But at Herculaneum was found a Medea who is terrible indeed, wild-eyed and murderous, such a figure as none but the greatest artist could conceive and few copyists could reproduce. Set this Medea in her place in the Pompeian fresco and the result may well be the Medea of Timomachus, one of the most famous pictures of all antiquity.

The school in which these artists, Pompeians or travelling painters, found their models was Hellenist, Greek art of the period subsequent to Alexander the Great. They did not draw by preference upon its highest compositions. Serious treatment of the ancient myths, that treatment which revealed the great and elemental facts from which they sprang, was not popular in Pompeii, where the citizens appear to have preferred a lighter and more artificial view of life--love without its passion, the comedy of manners rather than the tragedy. These gay feasters desired to see no skeletons among their roses and their winecups. They preferred light laughing cupids, kind towards the human frailties of both men and women. It was a joyous, light-hearted, unreflecting society on which this terrible destruction fell, luxurious and vicious. The realisation of that fact tightens the sense of tragedy, as the sudden annihilation of a group of children playing with their flowers seems more pitiful than the death of men.

There are a thousand things still to say of Pompeii, but they are beyond my scope. The westering sun has turned all the hills above Castellammare into purple clouds. The heat lies among the broken city walls. It is enough. I turn away, and take up anew the course of my journey.

It is no long way from the turfed ridges which conceal Pompeii to the first rises of the Castellammare Mountains. The road crosses the Sarno, and cuts straight and dusty through wide fields of beans and lupins, with here and there a gaunt farmhouse, or massaria, bare of all attempt to make it pleasant to the eye. The bitter lupins are almost, if not quite, the cheapest food that can be bought in Naples, and are accordingly sold principally to the very poor by the "lupinaria," who may be seen any day in the precinct of the Porta Capuana, or in the byways round about the Mercato. Does anyone ask how the beans became so bitter? It was by the curse of our Lord, who was fleeing from the Pharisees, and hid Himself in a field of lupins. The beans were dry, and betrayed His movements by their rustling; whereupon He cursed them, and they have been bitter ever since.

There is no doubt that the Sarno was navigable when Pompeii was a living city, but these many centuries it has been a rather dirty ditch, unapproachable by shipping. Its chief interest for me lies in the fact that along its bank, and across all the fertile country up to the base of the great mountains, was fought the last great battle of the Goths, those brave Teutons out of whom, as Mr. Hodgkin says, "so noble a people might have been made to cultivate and to defend the Italian peninsula." Heaven had been very kind to Italy in this sixth century after Christ. It had sent down upon her from the north a race of conquerors, barbarian, it is true, but brave, honourable, sincere, and possessing every capability for government. They conquered Italy from end to end. No province, no city, held out against them. From the Alps to Sicily they were supreme, and their genius, humane and not disdainful either of the arts or Christianity, was rapidly fusing every warring element of the peninsula into a mighty nation--Germanic earnestness infused with Latin wit--when the lord of the world, the Roman Emperor in distant Constantinople, resolved to put forth his strength and drive out these strangers, these builders of a nation, who were tending what he had neglected, defending what he had left open to attack, and reaping harvests of which he, out of all men, was least entitled to proclaim himself the sower.

So the Emperor sent first Belisarius, and then Narses, and long and bitter was the war which followed. Mr. Hodgkin, in his fourth volume, has told it in a style which is beyond all praise. Upon these plains was fought out the last battle of the Goths. Here Narses brought them to bay. For two months they lay along the line of the Sarno, while Narses, baffled by the river, plotted how to take them in the rear. At last he won over some traitor of an admiral, who surrendered to him the Gothic fleet, lying, perhaps, at Castellammare; and the Goths, finding that the port was no longer theirs, fell back upon the hills, entrenching themselves upon the spot where the ruined castle of Lettere now stands. But their supplies were cut off--it was impossible to feed an army on the barren mountains--and adopting counsels of despair, they descended to the plain and gave battle to the Imperial troops.

It was a great and terrible fight. Goths and Romans fought on foot. Teias the king fell after bearing himself right nobly; but the Goths fought on, and when darkness interrupted the engagement they did but pause in order to renew it with no less desperation when the light returned. When both armies were nearly wearied out the Goths sent a messenger to Narses. They perceived, they said, that God had declared against them, and that the strife was hopeless. If terms were granted they would depart from Italy. The Imperial general accepted their proposals, and the Goths, the noblest invaders who ever entered Italy, turned their backs for ever on the fertile land where they had made their homes, crossed the Alps in order, and were never heard of in Italy again. So perished, until our day, the last hope of unity for Italy, and for full thirteen centuries that unhappy land was drenched in constant blood--the prey of conquerors who could not conquer, and the sport of statesmen who never learnt to govern. For the Roman Emperor could build no state comparable to the one he had destroyed, and what Italy owes to him is forty generations of unhappiness.

In travelling through this country one is haunted by the perpetual desire to look back into past ages, and admonished almost as often that as yet one cannot do so. Indeed, one looks forward almost as often, anticipating that day when scholars will combine to assist in the excavation of all the buried regions, when every villa shall be disinterred, and the secrets hidden underneath the vineyards be exposed to the light of day again. Here on the first slopes of the hills around Castellammare lay the groups of country villas which formed ancient Stabiæ, and every man who goes this way longs to see them disinterred. For what is seen at Pompeii is but half the life of Roman days--a city stripped of its country villas and all its rustic intercourse. Pompeii stood in the heart of the country. Its citizens must have had farms upon the mountain slopes; they must have had concern in husbandry as well as trade; there must have been hourly comings and goings between the crowded streets and the sweet hillsides of Varano, where the grapes ripened and the wine-vats gathered the crushed juice, where the oil dripped slowly from the olive-presses, and the jars stood waiting for the mountain honey.

The day will come when all this great life of Roman husbandry will be disclosed to us, and we shall know it as we now know the city streets; for it is here still upon the mountain slopes, buried safe beneath the vineyards, waiting only till its vast interest is comprehended by people in sufficient numbers to provide the funds to excavate it. Stabiæ was by no means another Pompeii. It was no city, but a group of farms and country villas, and has countless things to teach us which cannot be seen or learnt beside the Sarno. The very houses were of other shapes and plans; for the Romans did not reproduce town houses in the country, but designed them for different uses, and embodied apartments which had no matches in the city. There are the residences of wealthy men, adorned with noble peristyles, mosaics, and fine statues, and side by side with them the home farms--if one may use a modern term--the chambers of the husbandmen, and the courts in which they worked. There, too, are buildings far too large for any family and differing in arrangement from any private dwelling yet discovered. The use of these great buildings can only be conjectured. Ruggiero, whose self-denying labour has collected in one monumental work all the information now obtainable upon the subject, suggests that they may have been hospitals, a supposition probable enough when we remember that the Romans must have been no less aware than we ourselves how potent a tonic is the mountain air for patients suffering from the fevers bred upon the plains. In Ruggiero's pages one may see the scanty and imperfect plans sketched out by those who dug upon the site more than a century ago. Posterity owes those hasty workers but little gratitude. They were inspired by hardly more than a mean kind of curiosity. They were treasure-seekers, pure and simple; and what they judged to be of little value they broke up with their pickaxes. Swinburne, the traveller, watched a portion of the excavations, but without intelligence, and has nothing to tell us of much interest. "When opened," he says, speaking evidently of a villa on Varano, it may be the very one in which Pliny passed the last night of his life, "the apartment presented us with the shattered walls, daubed rather than painted with gaudy colours in compartments, and some birds and animals in the cornices, but in a coarse style, as indeed are all the paintings of Stabiæ. In a corner we found the brass hinges and lock of a trunk; near them part of the contents, viz. ivory flutes in pieces, some coins, brass rings, scales, steelyards, and a very elegant silver statue of Bacchus about twelve inches high, represented with a crown of vine leaves, buskins, and the horn of plenty." With this perfunctory account we must rest content, until some millionaire shall conceive the notion of delighting all the world instead of building a palace for himself. But the camel will have gone through the needle's eye before that happens.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Paderni is wrong here. Signor de Petra shows us that the busts only were in the peristyle. The statues were all in the garden.