With regard to the public lighting of whole cities on festivals, and particularly on joyful occasions, which we call illuminations, that practice seems to be of great antiquity. Of this kind was a particular festival of the Egyptians[440], during which lamps were placed before all the houses throughout the country, and kept burning the whole night[441]. During that festival of the Jews, called _festum encæniorum_, the feast of the Dedication of the Temple, which, according to common opinion, was celebrated in December, and continued eight days, a number of lamps were lighted before each of their houses. A passage in Æschylus shows that such illuminations were used also in Greece. At Rome, the forum was lighted when games were exhibited in the night-time; and Caligula, on a like occasion, caused the whole city to be lighted[442]. As Cicero was returning home late at night, after Catiline’s conspiracy had been defeated, lamps and torches were lighted in all the streets in honour of that great orator. The emperor Constantine caused the whole city of Constantinople to be illuminated with lamps and wax candles on Easter eve[443]. The fathers of the first century frequently inveigh against the Christians, because, to please the heathens, they often illuminated their houses, on idolatrous festivals, in a more elegant manner than they. This they considered as a species of idolatry[444]. That the houses of the ancients were illuminated on birth-days, by suspending lamps from chains, is too well known to require any proof[445]. Of modern cities, Paris, as far as I have been able to learn, was the first that followed the example of the ancients by lighting its streets. As this city, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was much infested with street robbers and incendiaries, the inhabitants were, from time to time, ordered to keep lights burning, after nine in the evening, before the windows of all the houses which fronted the street. This order was issued in the year 1524, and renewed in 1526 and 1553[446]; but in the month of October 1558, _falots_ were erected at the corners of the streets, or, when the street was so long that it could not be lighted by one, three were erected in three different parts of it. These lights had, in a certain measure, a resemblance to those used in some mines; for we are told, in the Grand Vocabulaire François[447], that _falot_ is a large vase filled with pitch, rosin, and other combustibles, employed in the king’s palace and houses of princes to light the courts. At that period there were in Paris 912 streets; so that the number of lights then used must have been less than 2736.