covered in these royal halls. Need we despair that the earth will yield up thousands of secrets equally curious with those she has so long kept silently in the sand beside the swiftly flowing Tigris? Let us salute those human-headed winged bulls, for they guarded the portals through which monarchs and slaves have passed, whose deeds and sufferings the sacred historian has chronicled in the Great Book.
But what shall we say to our Mother Earth not only handing down to us the belongings of the past, but often preserving for our curious inspection the very attitudes of terror, and the passing notions of a despairing people who perished long before the birth of Christ? Pompeii has been famous as the one startling example of a petrified past, if we may be allowed the expression. Destroyed in a moment, as it were, by the overwhelming fall of dust and ashes, it presented to us an ancient city with its full tide of life suddenly arrested. The wine stains upon the counters of the vintners, the bread just broken at the meal, the tools of the mason and the mound of mortar beside the wall in the act of being built, and the most perfect collection of the appliances of a great city, and of the furniture of houses of every condition, have long been shown to the public in the National Museum at Naples. Amid all these relics of the overwhelmed city, thus like a fly in amber so carefully preserved, to us, there was, however, wanting some memento of human terror to make the picture complete. It will be remembered that Pompeii was not so suddenly destroyed as Herculaneum—that the rolling waves of liquid lava did not reach the former city and destroy it at once; but that timely warning was given by the fall of the fine dust and pumice stones, and it is supposed that the inhabitants had time to escape; at all events, very few human remains have been found within its walls.
A discovery within these last few months has been made which will give a ten-fold interest to that ghostly city, which cannot now be said to be deserted, at least not by its silent dead. The chief of the works of excavation, M. Fiorelli, has lately been pushing his inquiries in the neighbourhood of the Temple of Isis; one day inside a house amid fallen roofs and ashes the outline of a human body was perceived, and M. Fiorelli soon ascertained that there was a hollow under the surface. In accordance with a plan he has adopted of taking casts of any hollow he may find, he made a small hole into the cavity, through which he poured liquid plaster of Paris until it was filled up; the result was a cast of a group of human figures transfixed as it were at the very instant of their agony, and petrified for ever in the last attitudes of their terrible death. The first body discovered was that of a woman lying on her left side with her limbs contracted and her hands clenched, as if she had died in convulsions. The bones of the arms and legs were slender, and from the richness of her head-dress and the texture of her robes, it was evident she was of noble race. The plaster had given the impression of the hair with the greatest minuteness; on the bones of the little finger of this lady were two silver rings, and close to her head the remains of a linen bag of pieces of silver money and some keys: she was evidently the matron of the house. By the side of the Roman lady lay an elderly woman with an iron ring on her finger; from her large ear it was supposed that she was a servant of the family. A girl was found in an adjoining room. She had fallen in her terror, and it was evident that she was running with her skirts pulled over her head. Pliny the younger, in his account of the catastrophe, tells us that the inhabitants escaped with pillows bound over their heads, in order to protect themselves against the shower of stones that poured upon them. This poor girl wandering in the total darkness of that day, having taken the like precaution, must have been suffocated as she tried to escape. The other personage was a tall man lying at full length. The plaster had taken with the utmost minuteness the form, the folds of his garment, his torn sandals, and his beard and hair. The family appear to have remained within the shelter of the house, hoping that the dreadful fiery tempest would soon cease. In this hope they remained until the fine dust, which penetrated everywhere and completely filled the interior of the house, suffocated them. The dust continued to fall, however, and completely buried them, hardening in the course of ages into a perfect mould, the impress of which the Italian savant took two thousand years after it was made, and presented the world with such a posthumous group as it had never seen before.
In another house just uncovered, all the furniture was found in a very perfect condition, and in the triclinium or dining-room, a most completely served table covered with the remnants of dishes filled with food. On the table-beds around, made of bronze and adorned with gold and silver, several skeletons reposed. The guests had evidently been suffocated by some noxious gas, while partaking of the meal, and thus we have preserved to us a dinner-party of the antique world. Elegant statues adorned the board, and many precious jewels were scattered around. About the same time a baker’s oven was discovered with eighty-one loaves within it. They retained their shape perfectly, which is identical with that of loaves now made at Palermo and Catania.
From these cultivated people of Lower Italy, let us turn for a moment to the rude inhabitants of this island at the time of the invasion of the Romans.
History gives us the most unsatisfactory accounts of their habits and customs. The child is taught to believe that they tatooed themselves with woad, like the Australian savage; but the earth has disclosed to us remnants of this so-called barbarous people, which lead us to doubt their being so extremely barbarous after all. For instance, in the department devoted to Ancient British Antiquities, the first thing that strikes the eye is a shield of bronze, so beautifully and boldly designed that we do not believe it could be better executed in the present day. Its centre is inlaid with different coloured enamel. It was found a few years since in the bed of the Thames, at Battersea; its owner probably perished in some battle with the Romans whilst contesting the passage of that river.
But Mother Earth has preserved to us tokens of the aboriginal inhabitants of this country of an