slow. Now, the recent change of government
has given a new impulse to this most
interesting labour, insomuch that during the last
few months, more has been done towards
disinterment of the secrets of this buried community
than had been accomplished in the previous
quarter of a century. There is a regular
organisation of labour, and about three hundred
persons, many of them girls and women, are
employed in removing the crust formed eighteen
centuries ago by eruption from the mountain
which now rises behind the scene, without even
a wreath of smoke upon its summit. Upon a
regular tramway, trucks impelled by their own
weight run down an inclined plane, and
discharge their loads at the end, just as is done
at the formation of a railway. An entirely
new quarter of the town has been thus opened
out; and there has been found within the last
few days the roof of a house, with all its tiles
lying at their proper angle of inclination, the
ashes and mud having poured into and filled the
room beneath it so completely as to support its
covering. There are two houses with walls
painted in fresco, looking, when disclosed, as
fresh as when first placed upon the walls.
Unfortunately, in a very little time the colours fade
away and alter. The reds especially soon become
quite black.

These changes are probably due to chemical
alteration produced by the sun's rays, and to
the oxidising power of the air. If, therefore,
as soon as one of these paintings is discovered
it could be washed over with a solution of
boiling glass, such as is used by the modern
fresco painters in Munich, these interesting
specimens of ancient art might be
preserved. The writer has suggested this to
Signer Fiorello, the director of the excavations.
The very substance is sold in Italy for
the purpose of preserving wood from the
effects of fire, and is known by the name of
liquore di selce. Several bodies have been
recently found embedded in a mass of
hardened mud; and the fortunate idea struck Signor
Fiorello of pouring plaster of Paris into the
moulds thus formed. In this manner an exact
cast was made, enclosing such parts of the
contained bodies as remained undecomposed. Thus
were obtained, first, the body of a man lying
stretched upon his back, his features very well
preserved; in fact, so perfectly, that his friends,
were they alive still, could have sworn to his
identity. Afterwards the remains of two females,
a woman and a young girl, were preserved in
the same manner; so that, while of the dress
only a cast remains, the skull-bones themselves
are there, resting upon the outstretched arm. At
the moment of death, the left hand seems to have
been clasping the dress. In the elder female the
left hand is shut, one of the fingers having a ring
upon it. This group consisted of one man and
three women, probably all of the same family,
who were attempting to save themselves by flight,
after having hastily secured certain objects
which they valued. Silver money; besides four
earrings and a finger-ring all made of gold,
together with the remains of a linen bag,
lying near the woman.

One is struck by the fact that very many of
the persons thus disclosed expired while engaged
in the act of drawing their dress over their
features. Two reasons may be given for this.
One, that it was done in the endeavour to
prevent suffocation from the mephitic vapours
given off by the volcano. The other and the
better, that it was customary amongst the
Romans to hide the face, when in the act of death.
Thus, true to history, Shakespeare makes Antony
say of "the mightiest Julius:"

And, in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell.

Time, though he shovels slowly, gets through
more work than the liveliest volcano, and is a
sexton who has dug the grave of many a proud
city. The remains of Roman London lie buried
fifteen feet below the level of the present streets.
You are on the Nile, and see, on either bank, a
green plain under a cloudless sky. The columns
and towers of the great temple of Luxor, rise
from among the miserable hovels of a starved
little modern market town. You sail by, and it is
all bright green plain again till a mile further to
the north the towers of Karnak overtop a palm
grove, that partly hides the wonders of its
widespread ruins. But on the green plain between
Luxor and Karnak, and for twelve miles towards
the hills of the Eastern Desert, stood the temples,
palaces, and gardens, of hundred-gated Thebes,
for a thousand years the capital of the great
nation of the ancient world. Time has done its
work in its own slow way, and the Nile, rising
from its newly-discovered source in a great
tropical lake, and swollen by the periodical rains
of the tropics (not by melting snows), has played
the part of a Vesuvius. Harvests wave eight feet
above the buried ground on which the glory of
the Pharaohs was displayed. At Thebes, also,
there have been recent excavations and
discoveries. Diodorus stated the circuit of old
Thebes, as reported in his time, to have been
sixteen miles. Strabo says that in his day the
vestiges extended in length nine miles and a
quarter. Those old sunny cities, with their
included gardens, lay large upon the cultivated
soil. Babylon was fourteen miles square;
Syracuse, twenty-two miles; Carthage, of which
also the remains are now being dug upon, was
twenty-three miles in circuit. Yet London is
larger than them all, excepting Babylon. The
greatest length of London street is from east to
west, in which direction one may pass between
houses for fourteen miles. With all its straggling
feelers into the country brought into a
compact square, the size of London would be
seven miles by four, and its circuit twenty-two
miles. This would include a population packed
together, with but a few little breathing
grounds of park and square to answer to the
Babylonian gardens, fields, and orchards, which
gave men the enjoyments of a country-house in
the heart of a capital.