of the banking system, but also from the very great excellence of the ancient hall, and its decorations.

But let him who has read with eager interest that curious anecdote in English chronicle, shewing that the influence of the London merchants was sufficiently powerful with the patrician usurers of Genoa to induce their withholding the advance of an enormous loan to Philip of Spain, indispensable to the sailing of the Invincible Armada; let him, I say, picture to himself a mighty and most venerable apartment umbered with the glorious gloom of centuries, let him embellish its vast walls with two tiers of statues, of admirable workmanship, and large as life, whose pictorial costumes, faithful to the epoch of each figure, are scarcely less interesting to the antiquary than their inscriptive tablets, immortalizing those acts of individual charity or municipal generosity, which procured them a niche in this Mausoleum of Good men; and he will have all that is necessary to inspire him with the profound respect I experienced for the time honoured Hall of the Bank of Saint George,

Petrarch, whose invectives and eulogiums are equally influenced by the poetical talisman, thus apostrophizes the Ligurian Commonwealth, in a sort of curtain lecture, upon her ruinous war with Venice.

those towers which rose to Heaven, those palaces where art excelled nature, those hills covered with cedars, vines, and olives; those houses of marble built under the rocks; those delicious retreats on the shores, whose sand shines like gold. Can we behold without admiration the more than mortal figures that inhabited your city, and all the delights of life with which your woods and fields abounded. It might be said at this time of Genoa as anciently of Rome, it was the City of Kings!"

I HAVE already prepared you, my dear P———, for the beauties, the wonders, and the nuisances you are to expect in Naples, but by an unpardonable act of carelessness I have omitted to mention the chief marvel of its vicinity.

Yet how shall I speak of Pompeii? how depicture that Sleeping Beauty among the cities, which the black enchanter, Vesuvius, cast into a slumber of almost twice a thousand years.

Of a surety he might have shut up many a fairer and many a nobler thing, but scarcely one more exactly calculated to place two remote Æras, with all their habitations, manners, and arts, in juxtaposition.

It is not Melancholy that affects you as you traverse the streets, and intrude into the houses, uninvited visitors, of Pompeii, for all is meretricious though elegant vanity, that glares at you upon every side; it is not Awe-for neither in their original proportions, nor in the detail of the buildings is there any pretensions to grandeur in this City of Hercules; and as for Compassion, I felt no more than I should for the harlot, whose rouged complexion, tinselled jewels, and artificial flowers daylight has overtaken and exposed. Curiosity is your prevailing sensation, and that is just sufficiently gratified to be tantalized! Antique, without being venerable, Pompeii wears a most unhappy aspect, and Time has amply indemnified himself for the compulsory arrest of his ordinary process by maliciously revealing her original voluptuousness in painful contrast with her present decay. Wandering through streets little wider than the back lanes of our provincial towns, and roaming from house to house, whose mean dimensions are encumbered with mockeries of those majestic diameters which still survive in Athens and in Rome, the eye is at once invaded and offended by a wilderness of colours, which, even in the freshness of their early glow, and notwithstanding their graces of design, must always have been gaudy, but which now merit an epithet, which, from the respect due to misfortune, I forbear to fix upon them. Littleness and prettiness must always.

have been characteristics of Pompeii in her most palmy state; now the littleness remains, but as for the prettiness, alas! alas !—It is no great stretch to say that it seemed to me more like the model of a Greek town than the town itself. Villas, temples, theatre, forum, all elaborate of littleness, seem built to be beheld, but never to be inhabited.

Doubtless this city of the demigod suffers every disadvantage from the circumstances under which it meets the modern eye. The vaulted cieling, the draperies in dusky luxuriance, which no longer mitigate the startling violence of those scarlets, and yellows, and greens, must once have enhanced their magnificence, and mellowed down the glare of those ornamental paintings which undoubtedly were solely intended for the soothing medium of such glimmering and subdued lights. They seem designed to receive a perpetual twilight, such as the brilliance and heat of a Neapolitan atmosphere made necessary for comfort, and thus would communicate a species of gorgeous gloom all the day long.

And if with venial partiality we compare these little inconvenient edifices with the united grandeur, beauty, and comfort which distinguish the architecture and arrangements of modern habitations; still while beholding the exquisite loveliness of their pictorial designs, and their divine delineations of the human form,

"Gods that with heroes leave their starry bowers,"

we must admit that if in the one instance we have left them immeasurably behind, we have but imperfectly kept pace with them in the other.

At any rate it is something to have trodden the Atrium, and reclined in the Tablinum, where Cicero and Atticus conversed and feasted, wrote and read; to have paced the very stage where Eschylus and Sophocles bade

With sceptred pall come sweeping by :"

and to have identified oneself with the multitudes who in this very spot turned pale at the demon chorus that shook their snakes and torches round the couch of the haunted Orestes: thrilled with admiration at the filial piety of Antigone, or softened into tears at the heroic self devotion of Alcestis. All this we owe to Vesuvius. But for his fiery deluge, we must to the end of time have been content to trust the technical canons of Vitruvius, or the graphic descriptions of Pliny for those minute details in the domestic economy of the classic age, which so strikingly illustrate the pages of its poets, and impart a more familiar tone to its historians themselves.

Still I must confess that I explored this heirloom of antiquity with feelings far short of my anticipations; and quitted it less pleased with its curious and exciting particulars, than dissatisfied with its deficiency as a whole, in that majesty