Mr. HAMILTON was sent to the Court of Naples in 1764. The post, in that day, was not overburdened with business. And for some years to come the new Ambassador found the Neapolitan society little to his taste. He was intellectual, and, in the truest sense, an English gentleman. The tone of society at that time in Naples was both frivolous and dissolute. He had to form, by slow degrees, a circle in which a man of cultivated tastes might enjoy social life. The public duties of the embassy could employ but a small portion of his time, and the temper of the man made employment to him a necessary of life. He threw his energies into hard study. And he possessed that happiest of mental characteristics, an equal love of the natural sciences, and of the world of art and of books. He could pore, with like enjoyment, on the deep things of Nature, and on the secrets of ‘the antiquary times.’ And in both paths, he knew how to make his personal enjoyments teem with public good. His first labours were given to the exhaustive research of volcanic phenomena. He amazed the fine gentlemen of Naples by setting to work as though he had to win his bread by the sweat of his brow. He laboured harder on the slopes of Vesuvius than an exceptionally diligent craftsman would labour in a factory—had Naples possessed any. Within four years he ascended the famous mountain twenty-two times. More than one of these ascents was made at the risk of his life. He made, and caused to be made, innumerable drawings of all the phenomena that he observed, showing the volcanic eruption in all its stages, and under every kind of meteorological condition. He formed too a complete collection of volcanic products, and of the earths and minerals of the volcanic district. When he had studied Vesuvius under every possible aspect, he went to Etna. The results of these elaborate investigations were sent, from time to time, to the Royal Society (of which Mr. HAMILTON was made a Fellow, after the reading of the first of his papers in 1766), and they were published in the _Philosophical Transactions_, between the years 1766 and 1780. They were afterwards collected, and improved, in the two beautiful volumes entitled _Campi Phlegræi_, and were lavishly illustrated from the drawings of F. A. FABRIS, who had been trained by HAMILTON to the work.[57] The collection of volcanic geology and products was given to the British Museum in 1767. [Sidenote: THE HAMILTON MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES.]