Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now, in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed, the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood, which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once more the danger passed away.