ghastly white. In other places cinder and rock lay matted in heaps, from beneath which emerged the half-hid limbs of some crushed and mangled fugitive.

The groans of the dying were broken by wild shrieks of women's terror-now near, now distant-which, when heard in the utter darkness, were rendered doubly appalling by the crushing sense of helplessness and the uncertainty of the perils around; and clear and distinct through all were the mighty and various noises from the fatal mountain; its rushing winds; its whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar of some more fiery and fierce explosion. And ever as the winds swept howling along the street, they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and such sickening and poisonous vapors as took away, for the instant, breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve and fibre of the frame.

Suddenly all became lighted with an intense and lurid glow. Bright and gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like the walls of hell, the mountain shone-a pile of fire! Its summit seemed riven in two; or rather, above its surface there seemed to rise two monster shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a world. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole atmosphere far and wide; but below, the nether part of the mountain was still dark and shrouded, save in three places, adown which flowed, serpentine and irregular, rivers of molten lava. Darkly red through the profound gloom of their banks they flowed slowly on, as toward the devoted city. Over the broadest there seemed to spring a cragged and stupendous arch, from which, as from the jaws of hell, gushed the sources of the sudden Phlegethon. And through the still air was heard the rattling of the fragments of rock, hurtling one upon another as they were borne down the fiery cataracts-darkening, for one instant, the spot where they fell, and suffused the next, in the burnished hues of the flood in which they floated!

Nearly seventeen centuries had rolled away when the city of Pompeii was disinterred from its silent tomb,' all vivid with 1 Destroyed A.D. 79; first discovered A.D. 1750.

undimmed hues; its walls fresh as if painted yesterday—not a hue faded on the rich mosaic of its floors-in its forum the half-finished columns as left by the workman's hand-in its gardens the sacrificial tripod-in its halls the chest of treasure -in its baths the strigil-in its theatres the counter of admission-in its saloons the furniture and the lamp-in its triclinia the fragments of the last feast-in its cubicula the perfumes and the rouge of faded beauty-and everywhere the bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life!

In the house of Diomed, in the subterranean vaults, twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were discovered in one spot by the door, covered by a fine ashen dust, that had evidently been wafted slowly through the apertures, until it had filled the whole space. There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing light, and wine hardened in the amphora for the prolongation of agonized life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a cast; and the traveller may yet see the impression of a female neck and bosom of young and round proportions. It seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into a sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door, to find it closed and blocked up by the scoria without, and, in their attempts to force it, had been suffocated with the atmosphere.

In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the house, who had probably sought to escape by the garden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of stone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably that of a slave.

Various theories as to the exact mode by which Pompeii was destroyed have been invented by the ingenious; I have adopted that which is the most generally received, and which, upon inspecting the strata, appears the only one admissible by common sense; namely, a destruction by showers of ashes and boiling water, mingled with frequent irruptions of large stones, and aided by partial convulsions of the earth. Herculaneum, on the contrary, appears to have received not only the

showers of ashes, but also inundations from molten lava; and the streams referred to must be considered as destined for that city rather than for Pompeii. Volcanic lightnings were evidently among the engines of ruin at Pompeii. Papyrus, and other of the more inflammable materials, are found in a burned state. Some substances in metal are partially melted; and a bronze statue is completely shivered, as by lightning. Upon the whole-excepting only the inevitable poetic license of shortening the time which the destruction occupied-I believe my description of that awful event is very little assisted by invention, and will be found not the less accurate for its appearance in a romance.

THE JEWS' LAST STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM: THEIR FINAL DISPERSION

A.D. 132

CHARLES MERIVALE

The successful revolt of the Maccabees against the bloody persecutions of the Assyrian king Antiochus Epiphanes, about B.C. 164, inaugurated a glorious epoch in Jewish history. From that time the Jews enjoyed their freedom under the dynasty of their priest-kings till, B.C. 63, the Romans under Pompey took possession of Jerusalem. A period of Roman tyranny and oppression followed. In A.D. 66-70 a great revolt of the Jews occurred. The Romans burned Jerusalem to the ground. Josephus says the number killed in this revolt was one million one hundred thousand, and the number of prisoners ninety-seven thousand. Of those who survived, “all above seventeen years old were sent to Egypt to work in the mines, or distributed among the provinces to be exhibited as gladiators in the public theatres and in the combats against wild beasts."

About fifty years later, A.D., 116, a tremendous uprising occurred among the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, in which many lives were lost. It was quickly suppressed by the emperor Trajan, and the punishments were similar in cruelty to those which followed the previous insurrection.

But this dauntless people were not yet conquered. When the emperor Hadrian, A.D., 130, arrived at Jerusalem on his tour of the empire, he resolved that the holy city of the Jews should be rebuilt as a Roman colony, and its name changed to Ælia Capitolina; and the Jews were forbidden to sojourn in the new city. By this and other measures the spark of revolt was once more kindled among the religious and patriotic spirits of the Jewish nation. The Jews in Palestine flew to arms, A.D., 132, encouraged by the prayers, the vows, and the material support of their compatriots in Rome, Byzantium, Alexandria, and Babylon. The Jewish war-cry echoed around the civilized world.

of

A fitting leader for the insurrectionists soon appeared in the person Simon Barcochebas. Julius Severus, who was in Britain ordering the affairs of that distant province, was summoned to the East to quell the disturbance, which had swollen to the dimensions of a revolution and threatened to abolish Roman authority in Palestine. The conflict which ensued lasted from A.D. 132 to 135, and was very bitterly contested on both sides. It was not before the Hebrew leader fell amid thousands of his followers that the Jewish forces were defeated. We are told that in

this last revolution the Romans took fifty fortresses, nine hundred and eighty-five villages were occupied, and that the people killed numbered five hundred and eighty thousand. The Jews were dispersed to every quarter of the known world and remain so to this day. The new city of Hadrian continued to exist, but did not prosper; and the Jews were prohibited under penalty of death from ever setting foot in Jerusalem.

THE thread of imperial life could hardly snap without a jar which would be felt throughout the whole extent of the empire. Trajan, like Alexander, had been cut off suddenly in the Far East, and, like Alexander, he had left no avowed successor. Several of his generals abroad might advance nearly equal claims to the sword of Trajan; some of the senators at home might deem themselves not unworthy of the purple of Nerva.

On every side there was an army or faction ready to devote itself to the service of its favorite or its champion.

The provinces lately annexed were at the same time in a state of ominous agitation; along one half of the frontiers Britons, Germans, and Sarmatians were mustering their forces for invasion; a virulent insurrection was still glowing throughout a large portion of the empire. Nevertheless, the compact body of the Roman Commonwealth was still held firmly together by its inherent self-attraction. There was no tendency to split in pieces, as in the ill-cemented masses of the Macedonian conquest; and the presence of mind of a clever woman was well employed in effecting the peaceful transfer of power and relieving the State from the stress of disruption.

Of the accession of Publius Ælius Hadrianus, A.D., 117, to the empire; of the means by which it was effected; of the character and reputation he brought with him to the throne; of the first measures of his reign, by which he renounced the latest conquests of his predecessor, while he put forth all his power to retain the realms bequeathed him from an earlier period-is matter for another story.

But let us turn to a review of eastern affairs; to the great Jewish insurrection, and the important consequences which followed from it. Trajan was surely fortunate in the moment of his death. Vexed, as he doubtless was, by the frustration of his grand designs for incorporating the Parthian monarchy with