1000; then the reverse movement took place until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them. Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at any other epoch of the world’s history. Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge, even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here, however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful