busied in going aloft to furl the sail; and the soul, as a bird at the mast head, expands her wings to fly away;-the voyage of life is ended! 21st. The usual liberality (bah!) of the Continent, in opposition to our beggarly mode of procedure with respect to public places, museums, and the like, is extensively shown here by locking up ten or twelve of the most interesting parts of the city, to which admission is obtained by paying the custode of each. We who are students and have permission to draw, and of course to see, from the officer appointed by the Government-we too must pay all the fellows who carry keys, or be excluded from almost all that is worth seeing or drawing. Our permissions certainly limit us to things that have been already published; but many of them are under lock, and can only be seen by the application of silver keys. Visitors are obliged to have official ciceroni, who of course must be paid: that of itself would be reasonable enough; but they have also to pay all the fellows who carry keys of locked places. It is not only at Pompeii that such abuses exist at the Museum in Naples you are liable to be insulted if you go a second time without having feed the beggarly hounds who infest it. We have been engaged to-day in taking the plan of one of the private mansions. In generals the houses of Pompeii agree:-in having one or two atria or quadrangular courts, so that you are not obliged to pass through one room to enter another, as in the houses of modern Italy, but every room opens on one of the courts or on a passage,-in the almost total absence of windows, and in presenting no indication of a second story, being all on the ground floor, except here and there, where a steep declivity obliged the atrium to be placed below, and then there is found a set of rooms attached to it, and under the apartments on the level of the street. In particulars they do not agree :—in the relative situations of the atria,-the distribution of the apartments, surrounding or not the courts with porticoes, and the like. The house on which we are engaged has two atria; the first, or Tuscan atrium, is entered from a street about fifteen feet in breadth, by a passage thirteen feet long and six wide, having a Mosaic pavement, finished on the inside by the word SALVE in large Roman capitals; the atrium is twentyeight feet by twenty-two feet nine inches, and has in the middle a compluvium or reservoir five feet seven inches by four feet two inches. A passage or vestibule leads from the Tuscan, to the Corinthian atrium, which is forty-nine feet by thirty-nine, and has a covered portico all round; the rooms which surround it are painted and finished in the most elegant taste: a very large one (thirty-four feet by seventeen) had its walls covered with perspective views; but the choicest pictures have been cut out and taken away to Portici. The floors are all in Mosaic, some plain, and others ornamented with dots, frets, labyrinths, flowers, and the like, generally made up of black and white, but sometimes with a greater variety of colours. 22. Returning from the gate of the city this morning, whither 1 had been to see my old companions, who had just returned with their new ones from a tour through the Islands, I went into the newly discovered edifice called the Pantheon. It is quadrangular, and nearly equilateral, and has three entrances-two on two of the sides from streets, and the principai, which consists of two doors divided by a pier, opening on the Forum. The east end (opposite the Forum entrance) is divided into three parts, the centre of which has a pedestal against the back wall. The front of this division appears to have been architecturally ornamented. The south apartment (that to the right) has a wall on three of its sides about two feet six inches high, and about the same distance from the walls of the building; the top of this dwarf wall slopes outward, and is plastered all over, and painted red. The north division is, as well as the other two, painted in the Pompeian style, with elegant ornaments, and on the dado are scenes with animals of different species, generally in hunting groups, very spiritedly drawn, and beautifully coloured. The south side of the quadrangle is divided into cells open to the inside, and prettily painted, having a bird or beast of some sort in the "e centre of a large panel on every hand. Towards the Forum, the inside front is straight; on one half of it the paintings are better, and in better preservation, than any others in the city. Landscapes and history pieces, with architectural compositions, are admirably blended, and produce the most pleasing effects imaginable. The north side is straight also, and has some sweet paintings on it; on the walls of a recess, in which is a door opening into a street, there some chiar'oscuro figures, generally of children in groups, referring, I think, the story of Cupid and Psyche. The inner part of the quadrangle is sunk, like that of the Serapidon at Pozzuoli, and has-a raised pavement in the middle, dodecagonal with a pedestal on each side, probably for statues of the twelve great gods. This, I suppose, has given rise to the name Pantheon for this place, for I see nothing else to warrant it. There is no plan yet published of this interesting structure, and for that reason they will not allow us to make one of it. -23d. We walked to Torre del Greco this morning, and took a calash thence to Resina, where we dined; and having made the best bargain we could for the service of a guide and two asses, we bestrode the latter and started for Vesuvius: My legs being almost as long as Maccaroni was high, I had to be careful that my feet did not trail on the ground; but Maccaroni trudged on merrily, and did not heed it: when I offended him, he would prick up his long ears, put his nose between his legs and throw out behind, in the vain hope of throwing me out before. About an hour brought us to the Hermitage, a house with accommodations for travellers, pleasantly situated on the brow of a long hill between two valleys, down which the lava from the mountain generally takes its course. Two men live there and are called hermits; but, in fact, the house is an inn, and the men are the inn keepers; the one whom we saw, from the answers he gave to some of our inquiries, appears to be a very ignorant man; he was dressed in the habit of the Capuchins. Leaving the Hermitage, the path leads along the ridge of the hill behind it for some distance, and then traverses the fields of lava to the foot of the cone. On arriving there we dismounted, and began the steep ascent on foot; my companion had the assistance of the guide, and I had that of a long stick. In some parts the footing is hard and firm; sometimes a mass of stone may be stepped on with dubious security, for, being imbedded in loose ashes and cinders, the tenure is but too frail; the chance of falling on your nose by the slipping of a stone, is better, however, than walking through the ashes and cinders themselves, in which you take three steps to make the progress of one. In the ascent we rested thrice, and were about thirty-five minutes from the base of the cone to its summit. Standing on the edge of the crater, as the custom is, we first drank a bottle of Lacrima Cristi, and then walked round to observe it in all parts. The loose and broken, black and precipitous sides, shelve but little, and only in some places, down to an arena, level, and apparently hard like the sea-shore; at the depth of at least two-thirds of the cone, which thus becomes a mere shell. Incessantly, concussions take place by the breaking out of sulphurous vapour in fresh places, and although very slight, they occasion the stones to move, and go rattling in showers down into the arena, sounding as they trundle along like an irregular discharge of musquetry. An echo clearly repeats a whistle or a shout, but after a greater length of time than any other I ever heard. Terrible though it may appear within, the view without is grand and beautiful: the whole gulph, with its promontories and islands, and the cities and villages on its shores, were all spread out before us; clouds, which were under our feet, covered the plain between Naples and the mountains; but the snowy Apennines themselves appeared behind, stretching along and directing the eye towards Gaeta, where the view was bounded. We remained on the summit of the mountain till near sunset, when, seeing no chance of a particularly fine oue, and our feet being nigh burned with the scorching heat of the burning matter under them, we drank a second flask of the mountain wine, and in five minutes after were at the base of the cone. 24th. We slept at Portici last night, not being able to get accommodation at Resina; and after visiting Naples in the morning, returned to Pompeii to pranzo; and have since been at work in some sheltered rooms drawing ornaments, of which we are every day finding specimens more and more beautiful. In our madness at the outrage, we were glad to find no English names scratched on the paintings; barbarian Italians, and others their continental neighbours, have thus actually defaced some of these beautiful evidences of the taste and genius of the ancient inhabitants of this disgraced and degraded country. -25th. One of the finest days imaginable for drawing out of doors, dry and temperate, too cloudy for the sun to be oppressive, and a wind too northerly to be sultry: on the strength of it we have made a considerable addition to our stock of tracings and sketches. The Pompeian temples are generally prostyle, some are tetrastyle, and others hexastyle. The Temple of Isis is unique and droll with its uniquity; it bears more resemblance to some of the modern Roman churches in its elevation than to any thing else. That of Esculapius is a mere nothing either in size or consideration, presenting at present but its bare walls, a few feet high. The Basilica must have had an imposing effect from its comparative magnitude:its Corinthian capitals for the columns of the aisles are the best in Pompeii, and much in the style of those of the Temple at Tivoli; but the lonic capitals of the large columns of the nave are decidedly barbarous. The shafts are all of brick, stuccoed and fluted; the walls are stuccoed, rusticated, and painted flat. Stucco appears to have been greatly in vogue with the Pompeians, for they have frequently plastered over stone, even when it had been perfectly wrought. Within the peribolus of the Temple of Venus there are Doric columns and fragments of their entablature, which have the stucco in some places chipped off, leaving the original contour of the cornice, and the frieze with triglyphs complete, wrought in stone; but all had been stuccoed and painted!* I repeat, whatever their taste in painting and sculpture may have been, they certainly had a most vitiated gusto in architecture. The streets of the city are paved with lava, and have footways to them, generally so narrow that two persons cannot pass; and it is the same with the carriage-roads,-two carriages could not pass on most of them; indeed the wheel-ruts in the pavement are in the middle of the streets, and prove that the vehicles could not have passed each other. The streets vary from about eight feet to twenty in width, though they generally run about twelve or fifteen the street leading to the gate towards Herculaneum is at the widest twenty-three feet six inches, with two footways, each five feet wide included. The walls of the buildings remain from seven to twelve and fourteen feet in height, and are built of brick and rubble work; but the walls of the city are in most places much higher, and are built of large blocks of hewn stone, here and there made good with brick and rubble; the watch-towers along the walls are in some parts very perfect. The circumference of the city by the walls is nearly two English miles. 26th. At noon, we turned our backs on Pompeii. On the road to Naples, we met numbers of horse and bullock carts covered with awnings, and loaded with men, women, and children, dressed in their holiday suits, who were going to a town not far off, which is famous for fun on its saint's day, and that will be to-morrow. At Resina, I quitted the calash, to visit Herculaneum. A flight of modern steps conducts to the subterranean city through a well, sunk for the purpose at the place where the well was by which it was discovered in 1669. Herculaneum was destroyed by the same eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Stabia in the year 79,† but it has since been Reasoning analogically, many, I think, will be of opinion with me, that the churchwardens were a plasterer and a painter when the Temple was last " repaired and beautified." + The classical scholar will hardly need to be referred to the letter of Pliny the showered on seven times by the fiery mountain, as may be seen by the different strata of lava in descending. All that remains open at present of the city below, are some parts of the theatre, and a few narrow passages on the outside by three of its doors. The excavations were continued to a considerable extent, and many valuable relics taken out; but as the towns of Resina and Portici, with the royal palaces, which are built over Herculaneum, would have been endangered, had they been carried further, piers were built and the rubbish left to prevent accident. Enough, however, was done to prove that this was a city of much greater consequence than Pompeii; its streets were broad and straight, paved with lava, and had footways on each side,—its theatre is much larger, and every article found spoke of more luxurious refinement. The custode led me through the passages, and showed various fragments of columns, painted walls, burned timber, and the like; of course, it is all seen by torch-light. It is supposed that with the ashes which destroyed Herculaneum, a vast quantity of water was thrown out by Vesuvius, which, mingling with the ashes, flowed throughout and hardened into tufo, as the city is filled with it. The material was certainly much heated, as the doors and timbers of the houses are found reduced to a species of charcoal: in those places where it did not penetrate, every thing combustible was charred by the violent heat, such as the rolls of papyrus, wheat, barley, beans, nuts, almonds, bread, and many other articles of domestic use. The inhabitants had time to escape and to carry with them their valuables, for there were not found more than a dozen skeletons altogether, and a very small quantity of either gold or silver, or, indeed, any thing valuable that was not too bulky to be carried with ease. From Resina 1 came on to the Museum in the royal palace of Portici to see the paintings there from Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia. The greatest number are from Pompeii, but from all three places they are much in the same style; though I could not help remarking that those from Stabia have generally better drawing than the same proportion from either of the other two. Of course the merit of the pictures throughout is various; for they were taken indiscriminately out of shops, private houses, and temples. The colours on some are wonderfully fresh and brilliant, while on others they are much faded; one female head I noticed, apparently a portrait, was as fresh, as brilliant, and as clear as an oil-painting just finished. There are some beautiful architectural ornaments, that I should much like to make drawings of, if time would permit; yet some of the best are prohibited me, as not yet published. A painting of two quails pecking at an ear of corn is one of the most animated representations of nature I ever saw. A fine set of heads are charactered as the days of the week: Saturn as an old man, Apollo with a bright light in rays about him; Diana, with a fainter light bounded by a circular line; Mars, with a helmet on; and the others, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, as those divinities are usually represented. The most prominent pictures are: Hercules strangling the serpents, the size of life; a Judgment of Paris, half-lengths; a Hercules and Telephus, heroic size; an Orestes and Pylades in the Temple of Diana, while Iphigenia discovers her brother; a Theseus having slain the Minotaur, with the Athenian children kissing his hands and arms; a Dido abandoned; an Ariadne abandoned; a Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne; a Chiron instructing Achilles; a beautiful little picture of Roman charity. But what appeared to me the most singular, was a picture of Cleopatra with the Asp, as it must have been painted within a (comparatively) few years after the incident occurred. That that is the subject does not admit of a doubt, as lo is a principal figure, with a personification of the Nile determined by a crocodile, which lies in the foreground; and younger to the historian Tacitus, for a description of this eruption, of which he was an eye-witness, and in which his uncle perished. there are several hieroglyphic characters in various parts of the picture." Among mere curiosities in this Museum, the most interesting are the skull and the ashy moulds of the breasts and other parts of the body, and some of the drapery of a female, whose remains were found in the house of Arrius Diomede, and supposed to be those of his wife, as there was a gold ring on a finger of the skeleton. I have said nothing of either the Favorita Palace at Resina, or of this of Portici; for neither of them pleases me. There are several Casini along the road-side all the way from Torre dell' Annunziata to Naples, and some of them are rather handsome than otherwise. In the cool of the evening I walked from Portici to my lodgings in Naples, and on the road met some of the Napolitani taking an evening ride, and must confess that they are not all ugly; I am only sorry to see fine specimens of the most beautiful of God's works thrown away on such a despicable set as the Neapolitans generally are. I say generally, for there are among the Neapolitans men who would do honour to any age or nation. THE VICTORY OF TOURS. THE clarion rings through the ranks of war; The turban'd band he arrests for fight, Like the eagle stayed in his mid-day flight, The husbandman Death hath his harvest there, All hoarded in darkness deep: But no field he hath cut on his harvest day, The towers of Tours flout the distant skies, It was not enough on my return from the contemplation of the chaste and elegant costumes of the ancients, and of the picturesque and frequently beautiful draperies, painted on the female figure by the great masters of the fifteenth century, that I should be disgusted in Paris by the vile disfigurations practised by the gaunt beauties of Gaul, but that I must find my own lovely countrywomen too, wearing bonnets or hats, or whatever they are called, that would have satisfied Circe to make the companions of Ulysses wear, instead of transforming them as she did. Crested with an ass's head reversed and brimmed with cabbage leaves, the long ears tucked up and fastened over the nose, as if to prevent the dead beast from braying! |