THE base of Mount Vesuvius is about four miles from Naples. In going to Pompeii you skirt the coast, having the burning mountain on the left. Pompeii lies four miles further on the margin of the bay, so that if another great eruption was to take place, with an east wind, Naples might stand in the same danger as Pompeii; still they build houses and villages and grow grapes up the mountain side. One village has been destroyed no less than eight times. We did not go to see the crater, the day we had to spare was not bright and clear, and the fatigue more than two invalids cared to undertake. But we went to Pompeii. Within a few minutes from leaving the railway station you reach a kind of hotel and lodge, buy permission tickets, and take a guide. You enter by an arched gateway, something like the ancient gates of Chester. The streets are about as broad and steep as Watergate. Pompeii is about equal in area to the ancient City of Chester. As you enter the gates you can see the deep ruts of the two chariot wheels worn fully six inches into the solid blocks of stone pavement. Their streets, which are straight and narrow, strike each other at right angles, with a narrow parapet on each side. The houses are of one storey, externally very plain–no projections or balconies, but a simple doorway. You have to cross the threshold of the houses to peer into the mode of life of these Pompeians, who were suddenly swept out of existence on the 29th November, A.D. 79. Bulwer Lytton has written a work on the supposed customs and habits of these people. It would take a book to describe your reflections on this “City of the Dead.” It has not the appearance of a city destroyed by fire; all that has disappeared are the roofs, the doors, the people, and the furniture. The walls and plaster for the most part are perfect, the fountains and statues are there, the Mosaic floors are bright and clean, and the fresco painting as bright as when it was done. It seems strange that none of the present habitations of the Italians resemble those of the ancients, so vastly different to the tall stuccoed houses of Naples–one storey houses with an entrance hall, and an open courtyard with large and small chambers entering from a piazza that skirted the buildings. Some of the richer houses have an inner courtyard with a garden in the centre, and different offices leading from it; while others have engraved on stone the name of the owner. The Forum, or principal open square, seems to have suffered most; broken pillars and Corinthian columns are scattered about the halls of justice and the judge’s vacant seat; the dungeon where two prisoners, fettered, were discovered a few years ago in a state of petrifaction–they had been left to their fate on that fearful night. There are many public buildings around the Forum, and the Latin tablets referring to the business carried on in them; the steps that time and bustle and business had worn; the Pagan temples with their tables of sacrifice, are still to be seen. Then there are the theatres–the day theatre open to the sky, and the night theatre covered. The tickets of admission were rather peculiar, for instance, the musicians’ had a lyre, those for the upper galleries a pigeon, and free tickets a skull–all were carved ivory tokens. At the outskirts of the town is the amphitheatre, which held 30,000 people, where senators used to harangue their constituents and gladiators fought their deadly fights, where prisoners were brought from their cells to fight with and to be torn to pieces by hungry wild beasts. They have the street of Fortune and the street of Merchants. You see the wine shop displaying its sign, an earthenware jar, and inside you see the same seats, the same wine jars, empty and desolate. The habituÉs are not there discussing the topics of the day or revelling with the fulness of the wine cup; they are gone eighteen centuries ago. There is the apothecary’s shop with its sign–the twisted serpent, and bakeries with deep brick ovens. In some respects fashions have not altered much, in a baker’s oven were found black charred loaves with the baker’s name stamped on them, the same squat shape as you see carried about the streets of Naples to-day, and known in England as cottage loaves; from the same oven they shew you a young sucking pig, petrified to stone, that was there cooking for some one’s supper, in their hurry and confusion they left this dainty morsel behind. When a workman was one day using a pick he struck something hollow, it was found when examined to be in shape like a human body. Several of these hollow shells were afterwards exhumed, for safety and preservation they were filled with liquid plaster of paris. The fine ashes and the moisture of the body together formed this human shell a man in the act of running, with a key in one hand and some money in another. There is a beautifully formed girl of seventeen, her face turned a little on one side, with sweet innocent features clearly defined, with her hair dressed with girlish coquetry; a boy of twelve has fallen on his face, and there he lay. There was the body of a dog found with a collar round its neck in the vestibule of a house; the poor dog must have died hard, it has rolled over in its agony, and lies on its back with its mouth open, its limbs violently contorted, and the whole frame twisted and wrenched in a manner to denote severe pain. There was a girl found, with a golden clasp brooch bearing the name of Julia Diamede, said to be the daughter of one of the rich men of the city, whose house gives an idea of his wealth from its costly fittings discovered. These wonderful relics are shewn you in a small museum erected in Pompeii. You see the baths with the niches and seats for undressing, with nails to hang up their clothes; you are shewn the so-called Turkish bath, but what was really the ancient Roman bath, with its small stone seats upon which to sit while waiting for the hot air to induce perspiration.

There is abundance of proof that the people of Pompeii were steeped in degradation and vice, for the frescos and inscriptions were such that they have been moved from the view of women and children.

In the Museum Nationale, Naples, they have a Pompeii section; it contains almost everything you would find in a broker’s shop–pots, pans, fish hooks, money chests, candelabras, buckets, handsome cloak clasps (same as lately worn, and now produced in Birmingham by the gross), cooking stoves, braziers, charred walnuts, barley, olives with the drop of oil caused by the heat to stand out, a glass bottle of oil, eggs, onions, dates, pears, tortoises, corks, portion of a woman’s dress finely woven like merino, hinges, locks, taps, a circulating hot-water boiler with brass tap, a cooking apparatus similar to the French Bain Marie pan of the present day, leaden pipes, scales and weights, the metal pen supposed to have been a modern English invention, the safety pin, which is now so largely made in Birmingham for use in the nursery; a banker’s paper, receipts for money, a mass of copy in papyrus, legends, treaties, forceps, lances, probes, speculum and different doctor’s instruments, medicine phials, dice, and hundreds of articles supposed to be newly invented, and sold nowadays as novelties. The cameos and intaglios are of such rich and exquisite work that our modern lapidaries cannot equal them.