Besides these fountains, placards and posters enlivened the streets; the walls were covered with them, and, in sundry places, whitewashed patches of masonry served for the announcements so lavishly made public. These panels, dedicated entirely to the poster business, were called _albums_. Anybody and everybody had the right to paint thereon in delicate and slender red letters all the advertisements which now-a-days we print on the last, and even on many other pages of our newspapers. Nothing is more curious than these inscriptions, which disclose to us all the subjects engaging the attention of the little city; not only its excitements, but its language, ancient and modern, collegiate and common--the Oscan, the Greek, the Latin, and the local dialect. Were we learned, or anxious to appear so, we could, with the works of the really erudite (Fiorelli, Garrucci, Mommsen, etc.), to help us, have compiled a chapter of absolutely appalling science in reference to the epigraphic monuments of Pompeii. We could demonstrate by what gradations the Oscan language--that of the Pompeian autonomy--yielded little by little to the Roman language, which was that of the unity of the state; and to what extent Pompeii, which never was a Greek city, employed the sacred idiom of the divine Plato. We might even add some observations relative to the accent and the dialect of the Pompeians, who pronounced Latin as the Neapolitans pronounce Tuscan and with singularly analogous alterations. But what you are looking for here, hurried reader, is not erudition, but living movement. Choose then, in these inscriptions, those that teach us something relative to the manners and customs of this dead people--dead and buried, but afterward exhumed.