when he dies, and have a number of masses said for the rest of his soul. The chapels are small, say fifty feet square. In the center is a deep vault, and along the sides are burial-places. When a man dies, he is brought here and buried, and a mark set up to designate his grave. Men are allowed to sleep here fifteen months, and children seven months, when they are dug up to make room for others, and their bodies cast headlong into the yault beneath, where they are consumed by quicklime. In the walls of the chapels are a large number of niches. A wealthy person can purchase one of these niches, which is just large enough for the entrance of a coffin: this is put in, sealed up, and a marble slab placed over the spot, to tell whose bones are concealed and plastered in there. These bodies are never removed; but the exorbitant price demanded of the purchaser prevents all but a limited number from enjoying the benefits of the place. The Catholic who pays an annual sum to the church will also have his funeral expenses borne, and forty or fifty hired mourners will howl around his grave, and hypocritical priests will come and perform mass over him.

There are also deep vaults, capable of holding thousands of bodies, in which persons who do not fee the church are thrown, without burial service or priestly chant. The largest of these vaults has one hundred and eighty-three openings, and one of these is thrown up every two days, and all who are brought are cast down, and lime thrown upon them, where they speedily decompose. No mode of burial could be more terrible than this. No hymn is sung, no prayer is offered, no service is said; but, like a brute, the noble creation of God is cast into a pit, which seems like the yawning mouth of hell, and there consumed. The progress of

civilization is always attended with care for the burialfields of the dead; and the higher the refinement, the more delicate and chaste will be the expressions of interest in the remains of a perishing humanity. The brutal habit of the Neapolitans, with ground enough to bury millions, seems to me to savor much of the barbarism of the dark ages, and I turned from the pit with horror.

The cemetery also contains garden lots, in which bodies can remain fifteen months, when they are dug up and thrown into the vaults. Thus multitudes in Naples know not where to find the bones of father or mother. In their grief they have no tomb over which to weep, but every idea of the dead must be terrible in the extreme. The body is cast headlong into a pit, and is consumed by quicklime, while the soul is sent to a purgatory dependent upon the prayers of the priest and the alms of surviving friends. I can see the Catholic religion trifling with the living with some degree of allowance; but the idea of such horrid mummeries over the souls of the dead, who are in God's hands, when penance and Popery, mass and monkery, are alike unable to affect them, is one which is abhorrent to every principle of our nature. Twenty-five monks attend this burial-place, keep it in order, and do as much work as one American could easily perform. They live in an adjoining monastery, and employ their time in saying masses for the dead.

In another part of the city is the tomb of Virgil, which we visited one morning at sunrise. It stands over the entrance of the grotto of Posilippo, in a spot to which the ashes were removed by Augustus. We pushed our way out of the city, up the hill, passing through an unpoetical old gate, into a garden fragrant

with flowers, and shady with fig, chestnut, and palm trees, to a little arch-like building about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, over which the ilex tree, so loved by Virgil, casts its shadow. The garden in which the tomb is was once a Protestant burial-field, and a few of the broken tombs still remain. The ashes of Virgil have been removed. The urn which once stood in the center of this rude apartment is also gone, and the old cave alone is seen, with a marble slab erected by a foreign prince, to tell where once the ashes of the poet reposed. The Catholic church can afford to decorate the tombs, and build marble monuments over the resting-places of monks and villains; but a name known to the world, associated with works read by every scholar in every land, is allowed to remain unhonored. And we thank them for it. A friar, with his holy water and his wooden skull, at Virgil's tomb, would excite the indignation of every one who had read the works of Virgil. His writings are his sufficient memorials, and he can afford to do without a splendid sarcophagus.

To life in Naples there is no harmony. The widest extremes meet, and wealth and poverty are strangely mixed together. The indolent, filthy habits of the people, the wretched lazzaroni, the stupid monks, all render the place disgusting and odious. That it is beautifully located, that it has fine palaces, that it is richly adorned by every work of art, all admit; but all these will not counterbalance industry, temperance, frugality, domestic government, cleanliness, and happiness. The soft Italian skies, and the highly-finished Italian palaces, are worth but little, under such a government, to people with such habits. The cold, stormy climate of New England, whose bleak hills are snow-covered and

not vine-clad, is more inviting than the voluptuous ease and indolent refinement of Naples. To me there is but little poetry in temples dedicated to Mercury, Venus, and Bacchus, now broken down and filled with serpents and reptiles; in palaces, at the doors of which women sit in filth and wretchedness, raking out the matted and tangled hair which grows upon the senseless pates of each other; in riding on the shoulders of greasy, dirty men, into the caves which, if we may believe the poets, the beautiful limbs of the sibyls were wont to repose; in nightly assassinations and daily debauches; in the dirty feet and shaven crowns of the friars; in bright-eyed daughters of Italy who do not know their own mother tongue; in the streets where flowers and filth, fruit and folly, are seen in delightful kindred, and where one third of the people we meet remind us of the plague in pantaloons, and the smallpox in the unwashed chemise of the maiden. Poets may breathe their tender lays, and with professional license portray Naples as one of the outposts of paradise itself; but to me it will be associated with a fallen, degraded, dishonored, enslaved, and besotted people.

XXVI.

HERCULANEUM AND POMPEII.

I HAVE wandered in melancholy spots, where tears were man's most appropriate offerings; I have seen the tombs of Columbia's most honored dead, shaded by evergreens, and mourned over by the drooping branches of the weeping willow; I have moved amid the charnels of those whose names yet live in our most delightful recollections; I have crossed the ocean, and stood in the old Abbey of Westminster, where, amid the faded wreaths of poetry, the scattered laurels of ambition, the broken scepters of royalty, Death sits, a tyrant on the throne of skulls, sporting with the plaything MAN; but nowhere have deeper streams of mournful thoughts poured into the mind, than when listening to the eloquent teachings of the past in the deserted streets of death-smitten Pompeii. Here are a nation's sepulchers -the palaces of its senators and the hovels of its slaves, all buried in a single night, and forgotten for centuries.

Pompeii lies north-east from Naples, at a distance of about twelve miles, and at the time of its destruction was a considerable city. It was noted for the beauty of its dwellings and the intelligence of its people. To it philosophers resorted, and men of the schools made it their abode. It was a wealthy city, and in easy elegance lived its voluptuous inhabitants, the slaves of