There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made except to itself.  The people who still dwell here can hardly be said to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate the soil.  A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the excavated quarters of the city alone.

The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred:  happy the generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!  For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever.  O marvelous city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell?  Something not death, something not life—­something that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other!  What is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii?  The narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;—­these are the things that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so blest.

For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.

The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any thing of the Roman Coliseum’s melancholy and ruinous grandeur.  But its littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted across the arena with one’s friends; could have witnessed the spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts—­which must have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits and fine feelings.  It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena should really have done so:  the combatants would have rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow space.