It is certainly surprising[123], that this most interesting city should have remained undiscovered till so late a period, and that antiquaries and learned men should have so long and materially erred about its situation. In many places, masses of ruins, portions of the buried theatres, temples, and houses, were not two feet below the surface of the soil. The country people were continually digging up pieces of worked marble, and other antique objects. In several spots they had even laid open the outer walls of the town; and yet men did not find out what it was that the peculiar isolated mound of cinders and ashes, earth and pumice-stone, covered. There is another circumstance which increases the wonder of Pompeii being so long concealed. A subterranean canal, cut from the river Sarno, traverses the city, and is seen darkly and silently gliding under the temple of Isis. This is said to have been cut towards the middle of the fifteenth century, to supply the contiguous town of Torre dell’ Annunziata with fresh water; it probably ran anciently in the same channel; but cutting it, or clearing it, workmen must have crossed under Pompeii from one side to the other. In a work, so limited in extent as this, it is utterly impossible to give any thing like a representation of the various objects to be seen in the exceedingly curious ruins of this city. We can, therefore, only give a general outline, and refer the reader to the very beautiful illustrations, published by Sir William Gell, in 1817 and 1819; and more especially to those published by the same accomplished antiquary in 1832. Never was there any thing equal, or in any way assimilating to them, in the world before! The former work contains all that was excavated up to those years; the latter the topography, edifices, and ornaments of Pompeii, the result of excavation since 1819. “Pompeii,” writes Mr. Taylor to M. Ch. Nodier, “has passed near twenty centuries in the bowels of the earth; nations have trodden above its site, while its monuments still remained standing, and all their ornaments untouched. A cotemporary of Augustus, could he return hither, might say, ‘I greet thee, O my country! my dwelling is the only spot upon the earth which has preserved its form; an immunity extending even to the smallest objects of my affection. Here is my couch; there are my favourite authors. My paintings, also, are still fresh, as when the ingenious artist spread them over my walls. Come, let us traverse the town; let us visit the theatre; I recognise the spot where I joined, for the first time, in the plaudits given to the fine scenes of Terence and Euripides. Rome is but one vast museum;—Pompeii is _a living antiquity_.’”