The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him.  If the opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and lava bestow!

Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum.  And there he finds a custodian who enters perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels toward New York.  Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian.  On the contrary, he is one of the best-natured men in the world.  He is a mighty mass of pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet “Perdoni, signori! ma——.”  At the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava to sell:  there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the partito d’azione, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum.  We decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace (signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that we have ever seen:  his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his face on a level with his chin.  The effect is tremendous, but we nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.

IV.

The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii.  The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast.  So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts.  There was so little of Herculaneum:  only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging of