ments black; but other colours are often employed with increased effect.

The walls of the apartments are equally, if not still more deserving attention. They are painted, either in compartments, exhibiting some mythological or historical event, or simply coloured over with a light ground, adorned with a border and perhaps an elegant little vignette, in the centre or at equal distances. But few of the historical paintings now exist in Pompeii; for wherever a wall was found to contain a tolerable picture, it was removed and deposited in the museum at Portici. To effect this, the greatest care and ingenuity were required, so as to peel off, by the means of sawing pieces of wall, twenty and more square feet in extent, without destroying the picture. This however, was not a modern invention; for, among the excavated remains of Stabiæ, the workmen came to an apartment containing paintings which had been separated by the ancients themselves from a wall, with the obvious intent of their being introduced in another place. This was however, prevented by the ruin of the city; and the paintings, therefore, were found leaning against the wall of the apart

ment.

Another excavated portion of Pompeii is likewise part of a street, and, being perfectly in a line with the one already described, is conjectured to be a continuation, or rather the extremity of the latter; in which case Pompeii must have been a city of considerable importance, and its main street nearly a mile in length. The houses here, as in the other instance, are distributed into shops and private dwellings, some of the latter of which are distinguished by the remains of former internal elegance, such as tesselated pavements, pointed walls &c; most of them have likewise an interior court, surrounded by apartments.

THE MUSEUM AT PORTICI.

THE best statues, busts, vases, and in short, whatever was supposed, from its materials or construction, to have a superior value, were packed in fifty-two chests, and conveyed to Palermo, at the time the court sought refuge in that city, on the French penetrating into the Neapolitan

territory. What still remains, however, in the Museum, has a high intrinsic value; since who can behold, without the strongest emotions of admiration, the relics of the most transitory things, which for nearly eighteen hundred years, have braved the ravages of time? Here are to be seen bread, corn, dough which was about to be placed in the oven, soap which had been used for washing, figs, and even egg-shells perfectly white, and in as good a state as if the cook had broken them an hour before. Here a kitchen presents itself provided with every thing requisite: trivets and pots stand on the hearth; stew-pans hang on the wall; skimmers and tongs are placed in the corner; and a metal mortar rests on the shaft of a pillar. Weights, hammers, scythes, and other utensils of husbandry, are here blended with helms and arms. Sacrificing bowls and knives; a number of well-shaped glasses; large and small glass bottles; lamps; vases; decorations for furniture; a piece of cloth; nets; and even shoe soles; all sorts of female ornaments,-necklaces, rings, and ear-rings; a wooden chessboard, reduced, indeed, to a cinder: all these things are more or less injured by the fire; but still are distinguishable at first sight.

Every apartment of the museum is laid with the most charming antique floors, which are partly mosaic, from Pompeii, and partly marble, from Herculaneum. Statues, vases, busts, chandeliers, altars, tables of marble and bronze, are all in as good a state as if they had just come from the hands of the artist. The coins which have been collected are very numerous, and fill several cases. Medallions of marble, containing on each side a bas-relief, are suspended by fine chains from the ceiling of one of the apartments, and are within the reach of the hand, so as to be conveniently turned and examined.

Most of the pictures found at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiæ, and now deposited in the museum, have been sawed from the walls of the edifices they adorned. These unique relics of ancient art form an extensive gallery of genuine antique pictures, the only one in the world, and may on that account alone, be considered as an inappreciable treasure. They are placed in a range of apartments on the ground floor, and are suspended against the walls in plain frames. Their size varies from a foot square, to

Beside the

whole-length groupes, nearly as large as life. injury they have sustained by having been exposed to the heat of burning cinders, they have been impaired by the modern varnish which was intended to protect them: it would, therefore, not be right to subject their colouring to the rigid rules of art; but the grouping of the Minotaur, of the Telephus, of the sitting Orestes, and of the Bacchus and Ariadne, is admirable. In their paintings, as well as in their sculptures, the ancients were influenced by that love of simplicity which distinguishes their works from those of the moderns, and the result is, that in them the chief merits of composition are combined,-unity of subject, and unity of interest. When, again, it is considered, that the paintings collected in the museum at Portici were taken from the provincial towns, it must be inferred, that those which were admitted in the chief seats of art corresponded in excellence with the Lacoon and the Apollo.Such was the judgement of the ancients themselves, and their taste is not to be disputed.

The museum at Portici excels all others in ancient bronze, a substance which, although dearer, more difficult to be wrought, more inviting to the rude grasp of avarice, and less beautiful than marble, forms the greater proportion of the statues. The larger of them had been originally composed of pieces connected by dove-tail joints; and these promiscuous fragments have been recompiled into new figures, as in the instance of the single horse made from four, in the centre of the court-yard of the museum. Those fragments which had escaped fusion, were rent, inflated, or bruised, by the burning lava. In addition to these misfortunes, they have been made up unhappily; for the eye of an artist can sometimes detect two styles of art, evidently different, the large and the exquisite, soldered together in the same statue. The figures most admired are, the drunken Faun; the sleeping Faun; the sitting Mercury; the Amazon adjusting her robe; and an Augustus and a Claudius, both of heroic size.

The most remarkable objects in the museum at Portici, are the manuscripts, found in two chambers of a house at Herculaneum. Although they have been so frequently described, they must be seen, to furnish a correct idea of them. Before they are devolved, they resemble sticks of

charcoal, or cudgels reduced to the state of a cinder, and partly petrified. They are black and chesnut-brown: and are unfortunately so decayed, that under each of them, as they lie in glass cases, a quantity of dust and detached fragments may be perceived. Their characters are legible in a certain light only, by a gloss and relief which distinguishes the ink, or rather black paint, from the tinder. Cut, crushed, crumbled on the edge, and caked by the sap remaining, in the leaves of the papyrus, they require in the operator great sagacity to meet the variety of injuries they have received; since, in gluing rashly the more delicate parts, he might reach the heart of a volume, while working at the outside. At first, it appeared almost impracticable ever to decypher a syllable of them; but to the industry and talents of man nothing is impossible, and his curiosity impels him to the most ingenious inventions.

As the preservation of the subterraneous cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii was owing to a natural cause, that of the dreadful eruption of Vesuvius in the seventy-ninth year of the Christian era, the details relative to these cities, and the interesting results to which their discovery has led, have been introduced among the class of natural wonders now under consideration.

. EARTHQUAKES.

"He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.”

Towers, temples, palaces,

Flung from their deep foundations, roof on roof
Crushed horrible, and pile on pile o'erturned,
Fall total.

MALLET.

The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes,
And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons.
O'er devastation we blind revels keep;
Whose buried towns support the dancer's heel.

YOUNG.

THAT fires to a very great extent, and produced by various causes, exist at different depths beneath the surface of the earth, must be evident to those who have attentively perused what has been given under the head of Volcanoes;