At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August, which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment, except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents, gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631. Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo” (so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the