"And so good-night! A wonderful woman! We have been together hours--I do not know how many--to-day, but for the most part with very much company till the very end, when we drove home from the Queen's party and found Sir William retired with a touch of fever, which concerned the dear creature very much. She would not wait one second to pull off her wrap, but flew to him, only to find him sufficiently recovered to have sunk into the profound sleep which precedes health. Sir William was ailing when we left, I do not know how early in the morning, to see the ruins lately excavated of an ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the volcano about the time of St. Paul--a circumstance to be noted, because it enables us to judge somewhat the manner of men those Romans were, whom the founders of our wonderful religion were called on in a way to defy. I am inclined to think favourably of them. Pompeji, that was the name of the city, was a favourite haunt of the leading Romans, who founded and administered an empire which our own is only just now beginning to rival in extent, its riches being out of the question. The richest men in Pompeji were content with houses which no farmer in England would tolerate. You could put any house in Pompeji into the big barn at Burnham Thorpe, and they had no marble in them except for fountains and the like; the walls of the rooms and the pillars of the courts both being covered with a hard stucco, simply but elegantly painted. I could have wished that all the relics which the Queen has so carefully collected at her palace at Portici had been left rooted to the spot where they had been found. I wanted to see the brazier full of coals, which were half burnt when the eruption came down, standing where it was when Roman hands filled it with those coals; I wanted to see the charred bread on the table where it was waiting to be eaten; I wanted to see the skeleton of the sentry guarding the place where its owner had looked death in the face. At Portici they are only the playthings of an idle court, which might destroy them if it thought about them. Indeed, I have great fears for them: I must speak to Emma, who takes a scholar's interest in them, and a more human intelligent interest in them than Sir William, who of course taught her, and is the first _sçavant_ in Italy. The Queen would, I doubt not, give them to her if she asked for them; and if they are not to be at Pompeji, and this country is in a shockingly disturbed condition just now, they had better be put on board the first of my ships that has to go home, and be taken to the Royal Museum in London.