inclined to represent that any large public body,
comparatively recently established, could on the
whole be expected to do their work better than
the "London General."

LATEST NEWS FROM THE DEAD.

SCATTERED about the world are dead and
buried cities that it is one of the labours of the
living in our day to disentomb. Old Roman
towns lie buried in English soil, and one of
them, at Wroxeter, the ancient Uriconium, has
lately been dug up. We reported on its
reappearance in one of the early numbers of this
journal.* Then there are also Pompeii and
Herculaneum open, to bear witness yet more
impressively to the life of the past. At Pompeii
the disentombment is now going on with fresh
activity and good result. Old Egypt is delivering
up fresh secrets of her dead, at Thebes and
elsewhere. Spades and picks have been busy
over the grave of Carthage, and other dead and
buried cities of the Carthaginians. Nineveh
and Babylon, having been in the hands of such
resurrectionists as Mr. Layard, Sir Henry
Rawlinson, and others, are left at peace for a short
time. Any news thence is old news, but from
the graves of other cities what is the latest
intelligence?

* See vol. i., page 53.

By the sunny shores of the Bay of Naples,
stood for centuries the remnants of an old
wall; and the people who lived near it never
cared to dig below the surface. It is now
one hundred and fifteen years ago that a
workman, engaged in digging a well near this
ruin, cut into a hollow chamber, of which
the walls were covered with paintings. By the
slow clearing away of the earth from buildings
made by men who lived at the beginning
of the Christian era, dwelling-houses,
temples, altars, statues, built for the worship of
heathen deities, baths and theatres, were found
all struck to silence like the Sleeping Beauty,
only for a great many hundred years instead of
one; and, in our day, so restored to light and
life, that we see what the townspeople were
doing in the house and in the street, in the month
of August A.D. 79. There is written record of the
cause of this sudden burial of a city, whose
inhabitants were in the full tide of luxurious
enjoyment. The letter remains in which the
younger Pliny tells Tacitus the horrors of a
three days' eruption of Vesuvius, in which his
uncle (admiral of the Roman fleet, then lying in
the bay), having approached too near the burning
mountain although still miles distant from
it, met his death by the exhalations bursting
from beneath his feet. The admiral had asthma,
and the sulphurous vapours appear to have
suffocated him at once, so that he fell, while his
attendants fled from the scene of destruction to
embark on board their ships. Returning, as
soon as it became light, which was not until after
the end of three days, they found their master
lying, stretched as they had left him, as if he
had fallen asleep.

Of late years, the removal of the mass of mud,
ashes, and pumice-stones, which the burning
mountain had thrown out upon the city, has
confirmed the statement of another ancient writer,
that the town of Pompeii had been, at the time of
its total destruction, in course of rebuilding after
the consequences of a violent earthquake which
had happened sixteen years before. For, as we
walk along its streets, we not only see the
theatre and many other edifices to have been
in process of reconstruction at the time of their
burial, but, in the quarter once occupied by the
stone and marble masons, there lie portions of
an old frieze, executed in volcanic stone, beside
which stand copies of the same decoration cut
in white marble ready for erection in a restored
temple. There are wheel-tracks in the lava
pavement; there are worn stone-steps leading
up to temples and places of business; and,
curiously enough, there is stone, worn by the hands
of those who daily stopped to drink at the
fountains placed at the street-crossings. By
constantly leaning on one hand whilst they stooped
to drink the running water, these people, who
for so many centuries have known no more
thirst, wore a hollow in the stone rim of the
basin upon which they leant. Terrible testimony
is given as to the suddenness of the last
catastrophe. Bread is in the bakers' shops; there
is a meal prepared, but never tasted, in a tavern.
Outside that gate in the town wall which led
towards Herculaneum, was found a skeleton in
armour. It was that of the soldier on guard,
who, faithful to duty, had not left his post.
In a niche sheltering a seat for the use of tired
travellers, were found the bones of a woman and
a baby, and those of two other persons clasped
in one another's arms. A few paces further on,
were three more skeletons, two of persons who
had been running one way, and the other
of a person who had been hastening in the
opposite direction. Of these, one held sixty-
nine pieces of gold and one hundred and
twenty-one of silver. Money was found lying
beside the remains of people who had died
in the vain endeavour to carry away means
of the life whose sands were run. In a room
of the Temple of Isis, the priest of that
Egyptian deity had met death with feasting;
for near him were lying egg-shells, and the bones
of fowls and of a pig, together with a broken
glass and a wine vase. In the house known as
that of Diomed were the remains of a man, with
that of a goat having a bell slung round its neck.
In this dwelling were discovered more than
twenty human beings. In a stable were the
bones of a mule, still with its bronze bit between
its teeth; in another place was the skeleton
of a dog beside the bones of his master. Some
skeletons had four gold rings on the same finger;
one had a bronze lantern in his hand, with which
he had doubtless been trying to find his way out
of the thick darkness of that day of terror.

All these remains were discovered many years
ago, but the work of excavation was then very