suppose we must say, for the "goddesses,"
—goddesses, who, alas! were not averse to
the sight of human agony. In a word, this
was the part of the house expressly set apart
for the ladies. " What! " I suppose you will
exclaim, " did the ladies of Pompeii look on
without flinching while a wild beast was
munching the bones of a man, or two hired
wretches were inflicting desperate wounds
on each other ? " Recollect, that these
poor people had not the advantages of our
civilisation. As for the flinching, I don't
quite know what to say, for I think it
probable that a Roman matron, to render herself
interesting, might every now and then raise
her pocket-handkerchief to her face, or that
a young lady, on recounting the incidents of
the spectacle on a future day, might suddenly
be unable to stand without the support of
her lover; but, depend upon it, they all liked
it very much. Depend upon it, from those
covered boxes up yonder, they smiled upon the
eligible young Pompeians in the body of the
house, and looked straight down at the lions
and tigers when their glance had lighted upon
a briefless barrister, or a captain in a marching
legion. Depend upon it, they did all this
with as much composure as a British matron
of the nineteenth century holding up her
child to witness the struggles of a dying
malefactor, or the wife of a Spanish grandee
flirting her fan at a bull-fight.

Here is the gate through which the
audience poured in, and there is the entrance
for the gladiators and wild beasts, or " stage-
door," as I suppose we must call it. Into
yonder narrow cell were borne the mangled
carcases of the dead and dying, and further
on is the den for the principal performer of
the day—the lion. One can imagine the
breathless suspense of the audience, as the
bolts were being drawn, and the cordial
welcome with which they received the
preliminary roar, or " Here we are," of the liberated
animal. Stay, what is that inscription carved
on yonder seat? Probably it is the name of
the Decemvir or Decurion who sat there.
One must confess that they do not carve with
so much neatness now-a-days. Give us his
name, and the date when he flourished. " J.
Wilkinson, 1847." By all that is hallowed!
the British penknife has not spared even
these stones of Pompeii; and like Belshazzar
at his feast, turn in what direction we will,
we are always troubled by a mysterious
handwriting on the walls.

We are handed into the custody of another
guide, and led triumphantly through a kind
of orchard in the direction of the " Soldiers'
quarter " or barracks. What a silent, musty
quadrangle, with its broken columns of stucco,
once glaring in the magnificence of red and
yellow paint—the plot of ground in the centre
once actually a garden, and even now, I
believe, supposed to represent one—the two
stories of apartments, the upper one being for
the officers, the lower for the common men—
the Centurion's apartment at the bottom, now
fitted up into a dormitory for some kind of
modern guardian, or sentinel, or guide,
whose shirt hangs out tastefully to dry in
the mid-day sun. When this place was
excavated, before the door of this chamber
was found the skeleton of its occupier, and
the more humble bones of forty common
soldiers; trophies of victories whose very
names are now, perhaps, forgotten;
instruments of military punishment; lamps whose
last ray was thrown on features ghastly with
suffering and death; rings, possibly the gift
of distant fair ones, pressed convulsively to
the whitening lip; the half-unsheathed sword,
a token of the useless fury of him who grasped
it; the broken spear. But who is there who
will not construct for himself, out of the
various objects found strewn about, some
picture of what that awful moment must have
been, when Vesuvius poured her boiling
ashes through every pore and fibre of the city
and its citizens ? Who? certainly, not those
two young men, beloved compatriots, who I
warrant me will do no such thing. One
smokes a cigar, the other wields an immense
sandwich; they are laughing and poking each
other about with sticks, and " chaffing " their
guide through the ruins. I regret to say
that this kind of traveller is almost exclusively
a product of the British Isles. Dodging each
other round the gay columns of the Alhambra
—ornamenting one another with pigtails at
Mount Vernon, watching intently some good-
looking grisette in the galleries of the Louvre
—dashing frantically out of St. Peter's for
some newly-invented pipe-light; what account
can some of our young Oxford students, and
ensigns on sick leave, give of the lions they
have visited ? " By-the-bye, Green, you were
at Mount Vernon last year, weren't you?"
"Yes, and, by George, we had such fun! There
was an elderly gentleman with a cocked hat
and a young wife," &c., &c., &c. " Jones, you
visited the Louvre when you were at Paris,
did you not? " " Yes, and, by Heavens, I saw
such a stunning gal," &c., &c.

All this is not Pompeii. Let us get back
again. How rapidly one object succeeds to
another! Here we are in a temple. Where
we now stand, stood the devout crowd
believing that it was the voice of the oracle
that they heard, and the philosopher
making believe that he believed it. From
yonder elevation the lying priest, concealed
from view, counterfeited the voice of the god,
and on this altar the augur consulted the
entrails of the victim. How pleasant it is to
see all those things realised which we were
wont to look upon as a creation of Adams, or
a pleasant dream of Lempriere! How is it
with you? There is hardly an object here
which does not recall to my mind a flogging,
or a caning, or an afternoon spent up in a
corner, or under a clock, or on a table. What
is that comfortable apartment at the end?
The priest's dining-room! I remark that that is