“The ruins of Pompeii,” says Mr. Eustace, “possess a secret power, that captivates and melts the soul! In other times, and in other places, one single edifice, a temple, a theatre, a tomb, that had escaped the wreck of ages, would have enchanted us; nay, an arch, the remnant of a wall, even one solitary column, was beheld with veneration; but to discover a single ancient house, the abode of a Roman in his privacy, the scene of his domestic hours, was an object of fond, but hopeless longing. Here, not a temple, nor a theatre, nor a house, but a whole city rises before us, untouched, unaltered—the very same as it was eighteen hundred years ago, when inhabited by Romans. We range through the same streets; tread the very same pavement; behold the same walls; enter the same doors; and repose in the same apartments. We are surrounded by the same objects; and out of the same windows we contemplate the same scenery. In the midst of all this, not a voice is heard—not even the sound of a foot—to disturb the loneliness of the place, or to interrupt his reflections. All around is silence; not the silence of solitude and repose, but of death and devastation:—the silence of a great city without one single inhabitant: ‘Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent.’ “Perhaps the whole world does not exhibit so awful a spectacle as Pompeii; and when it was first discovered, when skeletons were found heaped together in the streets and houses, when all the utensils, and even the very bread, of the poor suffocated inhabitants, were discernible, what a speculation must this ill-fated city have furnished to a thinking mind! To visit it even now, is absolutely to live with the ancient Romans; and when we see houses, shops, furniture, fountains, streets, carriages, and implements of husbandry, exactly similar to those of the present day, we are apt to conclude, that customs and manners have undergone but little alteration for the last two thousand years.”