"Vesuvius covered with the fruitful vine Here flourished once, and ran with floods of wine. Here Bacchus oft to the cool shades retired, And his own native Nysa less admired. Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the mischiefs that themselves have done." [1. Hercules] Since the eruption of A.D. 79, Vesuvius has had many fits of activity with intervals of rest. In A.D. 472, it threw out so great a quantity of ashes, that they overspread all Europe, and filled even Constantinople with alarm. In A.D. 1036 occurred the first eruption in which there was any ejection of lava. This eruption was followed by five others, the last of which occurred in 1500. To these succeeded a long rest of about a hundred and thirty years, during which the mountain had again become covered with gardens and vineyards as of old. Even the inside of the crater had become clothed with shrubbery. In this interval, however, there was an extraordinary eruption--not of Vesuvius itself, but at no great distance from it, in the Bay of Baiæ, on the opposite shore of the Bay of Naples. The whole of this neighbourhood is a volcanic country, and was anciently named the Phlegræan Fields. It contains a crater in a state of subdued activity, called the Solfatara; an extinct volcano having a large crater called Monte Barbaro; and Lake Avernus, also supposed to be an extinct volcanic crater. Between Monte Barbaro and the sea, there was formerly a fiat piece of ground bordering on the Lucrine Lake, which is separated from the Bay of Baiæ by a narrow strip of shingle. On the 29th of September 1538, the flat piece of ground above mentioned became the scene of a great eruption, which resulted in the throwing up of a new elevation to the height of four hundred and thirteen feet, and with a circumference of eight thousand feet. It received the name of Monte Nuovo, and is now covered with a luxuriant vegetation. In 1631 there was another dreadful eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which covered with lava most of the villages at the foot of the mountain. To add to the calamity, torrents of boiling water were, on this occasion, thrown out by the volcano, producing awful destruction.