It

tion and death. It is absurd, however, on this account to affirm that they had nothing to do with the conscience, and sanctified only to the purifying of the flesh. There were certain fleshly or ceremonial defilements, such as the touching of a dead body, for which purification was to be obtained by means of the ashes of a red heifer; and to that the apostle refers in Heb. ix. 13; but it is an utter misapprehension of his meaning to understand him there to assert, that all the offerings of the law were designed merely to purify the flesh. What could any such purifications have availed him who had been guilty of fraud, or oppression, or deceit, or false swearing? Yet for him forgiveness was attainable through the prescribed offerings. (Lev. vi. 1-7.) We hold it, therefore, as most certain, that there was also a spiritual element in all the services of the old covenant, and that their unsuitableness to gospel times does not arise from their being exclusively carnal and outward. arises partly from their being too predominantly symbolical for a religion which contains a full revelation of the truth; and partly also from their adaptation to bring distinctly into view the demands of law and the liabilities of debt, while they provided only a temporary expedient as to the way of relief— a shadow of the real satisfaction. So that for men to cleave to the Old Testament services, after Christ had come, as being essential to salvation, was in effect to say, that they did not regard the death of Christ as in itself a perfect satisfaction for the guilt of their sins, but that it required the purification of the law to make it complete at once dishonouring Christ, and showing that they took the legal ceremonies for something more than they really were. But still, when rightly understood, these ceremonies differed from the ordinances of the gospel only in degree, not in kind; and it is perfectly competent for us to conclude, in many respects, from the design and administration of the one, to the design and administration of the other. Here, as in most other things, there is a middle path, which is the right one, and it is just as easy to err from it, by carnalizing in Judaism as by Judaizing in Christianity.

WALKS ABOUT NAPLES.

I.

THE route from Rome to Naples is thoroughly a classic one. On leaving the Imperial City, the huge remains of the ancient aqueducts are seen stretching across the Campagna towards the mountains, forming, next to the amphitheatre of Vespasian, perhaps the most stupendous material remains of the Romans that exist. They are soon left behind, however, and some of the scenes of the Eneid next invite one's study. A ruin, called the tomb of Ascanius; Albano, the reputed representative of Alba Longa; another ruin, called the tomb of the Curiatii; Civita Lavinia, and other sights, carry us back, at least in fancy, to the times about which Livy wrote a romance, long deemed a history, till Niebuhr, by his rigid criticisms, dissipated the whole like a dream when one awakes. Advancing on our route, Velletri, the first home of Augustus, the Pontine Marshes, Paul's Appii Forum to the right, and other scenes of interest, are passed; and at last we reach the canal, or rather its remains, on which Horace sailed in his journey to Brundusium. Our habit was to traverse such scenes with the poet for our guide-book; and if our travelling

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friends would adopt the practice, they would soon discover its value. He that has read Horace, for example, at Tivoli, the ancient Tibur, amid its evergreen luxuriance, its cascades, its temples, ruins, will easily appreciate the poet's taste, as well as thoroughly understand why he should have recorded the wish

"Tibur,

Sit meæ sedes utinam senectæ."

But, arrived at Terracina, his Album Anxur, we enjoyed no such flow of soul as fell to the lot of Horace. He there met with some of his most choice companions, while ours were a company of dronish monks, in whose society we could not comprehend, except by the laws of contrast, the joy of Horace when he wrote "Mæcenas advenit, atque

Cocceius, Capitoque simul Fonteius, ad unguem
Factus homo."

consult in this portion of Italy. Homer and Virgil
But Horace was not the only classic whom we could
combine with him to invest the country with what-
ever attractions the classics can bestow. The Pro-
Ulysses and his followers, is in sight—
montorio Circeo, the abode of Circe, so fatal to

"Proxima Circea raduntur littora terræ ;"

and whether the feelings were genuine or factitious, it seemed only now that we began to enter into the full meaning of the scenes which those poets depict. Gazing upon them with their glowing pages before us, one can easily deduce the distinction between those authors, by the diverse emotions which their descriptions awaken. Horace is succinct, pithy, and exquisitely tasteful; but his pictures are miniaturesa single word sometimes contains a paragraph of description. One of his own phrases addressed to Pyrrha, a female beauty, whom he describes as being Simplex munditiis, is precisely an account of his own poetry. Virgil, again, is full, detailed, if not elaborate, and sometimes artificial, though always gracefully so, but you have often to wait for his effect, rather than feel it rushing upon your mind and taking you captive whether you will or no. Homer, again, comes upon you like the full, deep diapason of a many-toned organ, and your whole soul is his without resistance, nay, with a kind of joy that half solemnizes. Amid these scenes, we felt Virgil to be pleasing, but Homer was grand and awing. He may be likened to the bow of heaven seen in its own sevenfold glories as it spans the sky. Virgil is the same object, only reflected from some smooth lake. Homer is perfect without Virgil; but if Virgil were stript of all that he owes to Homer, how bare and meagre would he be! His Georgics would still be pleasing, but his Æneid would be sadly shorn.

But we move forward another stage or two, and Fondi, long the residence of Thomas Aquinas and the beautiful Julia Gonzaga, around whose history romance and chivalry have thrown so many charms; the district where the Cicubian wine was produced; the reputed tomb of Cicero, not far from Mola di Gaeta, founded by Æneas in honour of his nurse Cajeta; the spot where the Orator is supposed to have been assassinated by the siccarii of Anthony; then the fenny lurking place of Marius when pursued by Sylla, with many other scenes, invited a sojourn among them. They would have repaid it amid their orange and myrtle groves, interspersed as they are with the gloomy cypress an emblem of man's chequered life

but we hastened away, and after crossing the Voltur

nus, and passing through Capua, wondering how it could ever have fascinated Hannibal (for in filthiness and pauperism it surpassed aught we have yet beheld), we hurried on to Vesuvius, Naples, and its glorious bay. Capua welcomed us, however, with a kind of royal salute, because our postilions were in a livery resembling that of royalty, and even its appearance is obsequiously honoured in that land whose oppressions are revolting. The environs of Capua are rich beyond the range of northern conceptions. From the vine to the millet, from the oak to the myrtle, all is rankly luxuriant. The culture of the land is laboriously, if not skilfully, 'conducted; and had that country which, with physical truth, but by a political misnomer, is called the Campagna Felice, a Christian government and gospel light, it would be a rival to that which Lot of old beheld, which "was well watered everywhere, even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar." We skirted Vesuvius with his waving crest of smoke, and so passed on to the capital of the Two Sicilies.

II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

In Rome, the first spots to which travellers rush are the Forum and the Capitol; in Naples, it is the Castle of St Elmo, or the Belvidere of the Certosa. Years have rolled away since we stood there gazing on the outspread glories that lay below, and mutely wondering at their multiform grandeur; but we seem to see and feel them still. Could one have forgotten the ignorance that preyed on, the superstition that inthralled, the political bondage that enslaved, the hundreds of thousands who crowded around that spot, the whole would have been intensely gladdening. Yonder are the royal gardens stretching along the sea-beach, where the luxuriant foliage of spring dips into the wave, as if it were a fertilizing stream. In the distance are the remains of a huge structure, once the abode of royalty, but now a blackened pile -a foil to the surrounding loveliness. Near at hand is the city palace of the king-him whose word gives law to millions, and who, by a single command, can occasion the butchery of thousands. His palace is like a barrack. Around and within it soldiers are crowded; and the frequent roll of the drum, as it swells up to the ear from afar-the moving to and fro of sentinels and patrols-all proclaim the wretchedness of a despot, who may dread poison in every cup, and a dagger in every hand. In front of the palace, see the Church of St Francis-a rival to St Peter's, not in grandeur, but in simple taste-reminding one of the chasteness of the architecture of Rome while the republic existed, before luxury and its concomitant vices had degraded that wondrous people. And yonder is the cathedral, sacred to St Januarius, whose bigoted priests, abetted by despotic and infatuated royalty, periodically impose upon the people by their pseudo-miracles, and render men's bodies the tools of the oppressor by first inthralling their minds.

Or enter the Museum; see the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum. There is a fresco cut from one of the excavated halls, as exquisite in taste as still fresh in colouring. That is a lachrymatory-a phial used for collecting the tears of the bereaved, to be buried beside the dead for whom they mourned-a quaint but touching mode of telling the departed the grief which his death occasioned. See, in that case, the apothecary's medicine disinterred after nearly two thousand years have passed. There are the dyer's colours, the

baker's meal, the cook's salad oil, and various utensils, set in order for preparing a meal that was never to be eaten. There are tickets of admission to the theatre, which was meanwhile rocking to its fall. Yonder are ornaments for the hair of the voluptuous Roman, whose refuges of lies were soon to crumble and crush her. There are the implements of the toilet in endless variety. There are dice, and other instruments of gambling; but where are the gamblers now? In that corner stand the altar, and the various apparatus for sacrifice; but where are the priests? Were they not their own victims? Taste the most perfect, which modern times can only imitate, presides over the whole; and yet they are the productions of men sunk in grossest impurities, leading lives and indulging in practices which it were polluting even to name. An hour in this Museum teaches us more than a year's study of Muratori, or any excavator of antiquities, could do; but among the ideas which crowded upon the mind in those vast saloons, amid the relics of eighteen hundred years ago, one of the most grotesque was suggested by the practice of entombing a warrior with his armour on, with food for Cerberus beside him, a fare for Charon the ferryman of Styx, and a vase of tears wept over his departure to the shades. Such is man, the immortal-the strange compound of deity and dust.

Emerging from the Museum, and gazing, as tourists do, for whatever is characteristic or singular, the visitor's eye is arrested by a huge dead wall, against which there are fastened some rows of blackened and hideous objects, which, on nearer inspection, are found to be human heads. They were seven in number, and one was accompanied by two hands. The wall is that of a prison-the heads are those of criminals said to have been guilty of the grosser crimes; and as they grin horribly from that place of disgusting exposure, they discourse as eloquently of the brutality that reigns at Naples, as poor Yorick's skull did of the vanity of earth. Encountering such a spectacle amid the blaze and the glare of a voluptuous capital, in the city of a sensual people, speaks feelingly to the heart that loves its brother man. Why were these sad symbols paraded there, as the guardians of our game nail up the heads of weasels, eagles, hawks, rooks, and all kinds of vermin; or as fox-hunters fasten the heads of their quarry, as trophies, on their kennel doors? Was it because they had been really criminal, or was it only because they had ventured to wish and to say that a despot should be by some shades less despotic? Was it because they had really violated the rights of others, or only because they refused to let others in high places violate theirs? Was it because they had been tried in open day, and condemned by upright, equal laws? or was it because some dark tribunal, swayed by personal hatred, by bigotry, or ignorance, had condemned to death men whose only crime was that of thinking for themselves, and wishing to be free? No gazette announces such things at Naples. No public opinion guides or checks them; and deeds are said to be done atrocities said to be committed-which cannot be unmasked till the secrets of all hearts are laid bare, but which, if report speak true, would congeal our blood with horror. How blessed are we Britons! or, if we prize not our blessings, how wretched!

But one gladly makes a circuit from such a neighbourhood, and hastens away to a spot where the mind may be soothed, and the eye regaled.

III. THE TOMB OF VIRGIL.

We are approaching the Grotto of Posilippo, a work which seems to throw even the galleries on the Simplon into shade. The Greeks began it when they were masters of this portion of Italy; it was enlarged by Lucullus, farther improved by the Emperor Claudian, and completed by an Alfonso I. Its length is about one thousand paces, cut through the solid rock, its width is about eight paces, and its height may be some thirty feet. Near the entrance to the Grotto we were guided to what we were willing to believe was the Tomb of Virgil, though controversy on the subject has been keen and high. Donatus, a grammarian, and Statius, a poet, refer to Virgil's last resting-place in language which favours the tradition that the dust on which we now stand may be mingled with his ashes, and we were willing in such a case to forego all Pyrrhonism, and believe implicitly After a steep ascent from the margin of the Bay, we reached a garden remarkable for the grandeur of its view-on the Mediterranean-the volcano-the city-Capri-Castell-a-Mare the Bay of Sorrento, and all that constitutes the glory of the gulf. We were led along a narrow path, near which a capricious Jew has caused his last resting-place to be prepared, and soon arrived on a small terrace formed on a precipitous bank, where the ruin called the Tomb of Virgil stands. It is mean and paltry, and so completely disappointed, or dashed, our romance, that we could not read a line of the poet by his grave. If it be true that

for once.

"Even in our ashes live their wonted fires," we failed to discover the truth. We carried with us some leaves of the ivy that clustered round the unpoetic ruin, and some acorns from the ilex that shadows it, and with these relics to console us, began our descent to the bay and the city. The inscription on the tomb was to us a riddle at the time, and added to our mortification. Here it is-who shall translate it?

"Qui Cineres Tumuli hæc vestigia conditur olim

Ille hoc cecinit pascua rura duces.'

But from the fictitious or the traditional the mind readily passes away to seek repose in the true and the real. And yon glorious bay, with its myriad laughing wavelets-Ποντιων κυματων ἀναριθμον γελασμα—forms an epic infinitely more noble than the poet's Æneid. A high authority has called the Rhine "The epic river;" here is an epic sea, the grandest poetry of nature-and the eye drinks in gladness from the spectacle such as no poetry of man's can produce. We have not Homer's woλupλ01ßos Jaλacra here; for the waters, as evening creeps on, grow still and fall asleep-but the Italian sun is shining, and could one forget the scenes which have been perpetrated on those waters for instance, when Nelson and his creatures, or his victims, floated there, the whole panorama might seem to be sending up an evening hymn to the Mighty One, whose glory it so solemnly reflects. Yon grisly volcano, just active enough to indicate its latent energies-that fathomless blue above, where thought soars away and away till it be lost in immensity-the sheen of that city so lovely in the distance, so morally defiled within-the associations which rush into the mind from the past, mingling with the deep feelings of the present scene and hourall pour through the soul an influence to which it rejoices to be passive. That sea bird, not driven of the

tempest as in our northern home, but floating calmly on the air with unwearying wing, is the emblem of the soul in such a state. But the distant hum of a thousand vesper bells awakes us from our reverie, and we must change the scene.

IV. THE CATACOMBS OF NAPLES.

There is a church in Naples called San Gennaro dei Poveri, where decayed servants are pensioned by their masters, and in the neighbourhood we were guided to the Catacombs-those subterraneous cities of the dead, which have so often fed superstition, and exercised the controversial ingenuity of the antiquarian. Those which we are now traversing, extend some hundreds of paces under ground, and are three storeys high, of which the ground storey has three tiers for depositing the dead in parallel ranges, one over the other. They are large and spacious as a whole, though the apartments for each separate family are small. Around the walls, as well as in the transverse divisions, there are niches in which the dead are said to have been deposited and built up till they had wasted away, after which the bones were carried to a general receptacle at the extremity of one of the avenues of this immense cave, where they still lie, a memorable memento of man's vanity, waiting the hour when the fiat of Omnipotence shall summon bone to its bone again. In such a scene, one feels in some measure the contemporary of the resurrection-at least it is by one degree less difficult to conceive of it; and the idea of the spectacle which will then appear, brought glowing thoughts into the mind. In ordinary temples there is much to distract. Who has not felt the effect of the glare of St Peter's? The augustness of St Paul's withdraws the thought from the August One. The Duomo of Milan does the same. Westminster Abbey teems with other thoughts than those of God over all; but here, in this vast charnel-house-this tomb of thousands-this dark, unearthly receptacle-what is there here that does not tend to humble, prostrate, annihilate, proud man? In such cities of the dead as the catacombs at Rome and Naples, thought is compressed and condensed— the mind struggles with its own emotions rather than dwells on what it sees around it. Help amid the struggle is sought from Him who alone can sustain; and thus the soul that is born from above, has its thoughts forced upwards to the origin of its hopes, and the home of its affections. True, thousands may visit the catacombs, and wander amid their dreary recesses, with mementos of death in skulls and skeletons piled up on every side, without ever thinking either of death or of judgment. Even amid such scenes superstition can drivel, worldliness can retain its ascendency over the soul, and he that is filthy can be filthy still, in spite of all such mementos. But if the wisdom that comes from above be one's guide amid such saddening spectacles, how deep and indelible the impression! It is more than the shadow of a coming event-it is the forewarning of a coming anguish, or the presentiment of a coming triumph. It is not the "turf in many a mouldering heap," it is the very bone that will yet leap into life at Jehovah's command, that speaks to the soul in the catacombs.

What was their use? Superstition has made them churches; and the plentiful images of saints and Madonnas tell that these recesses have been places of worship. The lying legends on which the Church of Rome founds her claims to antiquity, allege that these immense caverns were dug at first as the

retreats of martyrs during times of hot persecution. More prosaic and more true authorities regard them as first quarries, and subsequently cemeteries and retreats both for lawless and for persecuted men. Superstition at last fastened its gripe upon them, and now, like everything in this enslaved land, these catacombs are sacred to the Dii Minores of modern Rome. As if the dreams of superstition were to be received as veritable facts, we are gravely told, that, in the early ages, zealous Christians raised the remains of the martyrs from their ignoble graves, or ransomed their bodies at a costly price from their executioner, to give them an honourable sepulture in the catacombs. They, moreover, collected into vases of glass or clay the blood of those who were slain for the truth, and placed the whole, along with the instruments of torture and death, when they could be obtained, in the vaults of the catacombswhere some miracle performed by the relics, some sweet sound, some sweeter odour, or some gleam of light, first attracted notice to the future saint and god! Such are the legends of a drivelling superstition-not centuries old, and therefore in its dotage, but revived in our day, and circulated with all the pomp of unquestionable truth. Oh, how much we owe to the open Bible!

V. THE GROTTO DEL CANE.

Emerging from the Grotto of Posilippo, and sauntering along the margin of the Bay, a Northman finds himself amid strange, unwonted scenes. The ox is here supplanted by the buffalo, and the wild boar roams the thicket instead of the rabbit or the reddeer. The olive and the vine, rising to a height that is majestic, have superseded the stunted vegetation of home; while the air, so balmy, and genial, and soothing, tends, in a measure, to relax and debilitate. Activity is more painful, and contemplation is courted rather than energetic action. Hume, Johnson, and many more, have ridiculed the notion that climate could at all affect the nervous or the mental system: an hour on the shores of the Mediterranean would have convinced them that their theory is erroneous; and if in England one can attach a meaning to the words of Gray, much more here

"There, at the foot of yonder nodding beech,

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by." Amid other effects produced by such scenes, they render man amphibious; and it is difficult to resist the allurements of the Mediterranean waves, as they fall in soft whispers at your feet, to plunge into their depths or recline upon their bosom. And as one disports among them, he feels new life thrilling through his frame. At hand, in the grove, he hears how

"the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;" while far below him, in the translucent wave, he sees the ocean

"Paved with all precious things, not torn

From shipwrecked vessels, but there born;" and were his life merely that of an animal, created for the passing hour, but heir to no futurity, this might be his heaven. Yet, while joy and health are entering at every pore, one can recline (as strong swimmers do) on the bosom of the sunny sea, and rejoice in Him who made both the earth and the ocean for man to enjoy, and heaven as his asylum and heart's home for ever.

But we are now in quest of wonders of another Kind. The Grotto del Cane had certain undefined attractions for us from our earliest days; and as we read of it in such romancing, often blundering, books as those of Eustace and Lady Morgan, we wished, in boyish curiosity, to see the poor dog either run to howl or stand to die under the influence of the mephitic acid. We were now drawing near to the scene of the experiment. The grotto stands on the margin of the Lake of Agnano, the crater of an extinct volcano-and never did we see such stillness and seclusion as there. The only symptom of life, at the moment when the lake opened on our view, was in a few water-fowls which floated on the surface, but so peacefully as to produce no wave. It was one of the quiet and lovely scenes that imprint themselves on the memory, and rise from time to time before the mind like instinctive perceptions, often, apparently, without a cause.

Matters were soon in readiness for the experiment at the grotto. The keeper, with two haggard dogs in leash, of course offered his services. We spared the brutes their dole of suffering, and preferred encountering it ourselves. But the grotto-all our school-boy romance was dissipated by its pig-stye appearance. The gas emitted from the floor is not so powerful as fancy had supposed. At the distance of a foot from the ground we could breathe, though with difficulty; but two or three inches nearer, respiration became more painful, and would soon have been suspended. Close to the ground, torches were extinguished in an instant by the fixed air; and for some time after our attempt the lungs were sensibly affected, as if inflamed, while headache supervened. Altogether, had the grotto been described with less of inflation, and fewer sesquipedalia cerba, the experiment would have been worth the visit. Similar exhalations are common in various parts around Naples and, if the remark were not infinitely prosaic, we would add, in porter-brewers' vats. Sir W. Hamilton found them in the neighbourhood of Etna as well as Vesuvius; and in 1767, previous to an eruption of the latter, the chapel of the king, at Portici, was so filled by such air, that the sacristan who entered was immediately stifled.

Amid our wanderings we traversed what the Neapolitans deem the Falernum of antiquity-the Johannisberg, or the Hockheim of the Romans, as producing their most noted wine. We had a rare and appropriate sample of helotism in this neighbourhood-in the person of an intoxicated bullock; and as he wallowed and bellowed so lustily, we were forcibly reminded of the merry poet's ejaculation

"Fœcundi calices, quem non fecere disertum!"

The explanation of this anomaly-if we may give that name to intoxication in the district of Falernum -is this: At certain seasons, the stalk and rank leaves of the lupine, when most full of juice, are possessed of properties which produce such effects as we witnessed, on animals which feed greedily upon them. The steer had been indulging in that luxury, and was as vociferous as the Bacchanalians, who claim to be rational, usually are. The whole exhibition might have shamed a drunkard from his sin, as the Greeks shamed their children by the sight of inebriated helots.

But the excitements of the day warn us to close. Were we disposed to moralize, it would be on the danger of inuring the young to pore over such scenes

VI.-PUTEOLI AND THE BAY OF BALE.

One loves to linger amid a scene so tranquil as that of which the Lake of Agnano is the centre. But we are amid objects to which both science and classical associations lend their attractions, and we hasten away to explore. Scrambling along the southern margin of the lake, amid ruins covered with vines, the arbutus, and other shrubs, we reach Solfatara, the Campi Phlegræi, on which Hercules is fabled to have vanquished the giants, and the arena of other fabulous achievements. Here we found the Forum Vulcani, and many symptoms of the proximity of his forge. Vapour, charged with sulphur and sal-ammoniac, escapes from the crevices-rushing with a force which resembles a vapour volcano. As an actual volcano, Solfatara has not been very active since the year 1198; but the earth sounds hollow to the tread; and though the power of the subterranean agent may be weakened, it is still enough to remind one of the enormous energies of nature as directed and controlled by its God. Giulio Cesare Capaccio tried to show that this was the hell of Scripture, while some interpreters of the Apocalypse suppose that it may yet be the theatre on which vengeance shall be inflicted on the Papacy. But without expatiating on such faucies, all the region around us tells what prodigious agents the Omnipotent can employ in working out his designs. The sulphur formed on the edge of the crevices, by the rushing out of the mineral substances from below, has suggested the erection of a sulphur manufactory, which is carried on to a considerable extent; but on such a spot one turns away from the elaborations of art and of man, to study in the grand laboratory of the Creator. Here are exhalations that would stifle and extinguish life-for example, muriatic acid gas-separated by short distances from others that are inhaled as salutary, or even as specifics. Here is hot volcanic agency side by side with the accumulated results of ages of its action. There are the remains of craters covered with delicate heaths, with myrtle trees, and other shrubs-the extremes of sterility and productiveness mingled together. And superstition adds its influence to the whole. At some distance from the Phlegræan fields stand some ruins, long deemed those of a temple of Jupiter Serapis, but now regarded as the remains of gorgeous baths, like those of Titus and Caracalla at Rome. Their position gives them grandeur; and wandering amid the majestic pillars propped up by the debris of this palace of pleasure, one could not but feel, in a sense different from that in which Schiller meant the words

"All was enchanted ground-each trace
The footstep of a god.

Your temples smiled like palace halls,

And there ye held your dazzling court

On many-wreathed festivals,

'Midst thundering cars, and hero sport."

But where now are those gods and heroes? Where the worshippers of Serapis, or the voluptuous frequenters of the bagnio?

Pozzuoli, on the margin of the Bay of Baiæ, is famed alike by sacred and profane authorities. Besides the ruins already mentioned, one can wander here amid the remains of Cicero's Academia, where

tions. As usual, there is the amphitheatre; and there are still visible amid the waters, the substructures of a bridge formed by Caligula across the bay. But these remains are forgotten amid other reflections. After his perils in" the Sea of Adria," we know that Paul landed at Pozzuoli (Puteoli) on his way to Rome. "And landing at Syracuse, we tarried there three days. And from thence we fetched a compass, and came to Rhegium: and after one day the south wind blew, and we came the next day to Puteoli: where we found brethren, and were desired to tarry with them seven days: and so we went toward Rome." These stones, so worn by the waters of the bay, may have formed the very pier at which the apostle disembarked. Among some of these ruins, then forming a Christian home, Paul may have spent his seven days' sojourn, comforting the brethren-members of the great family. There he may have won souls to his Saviour, and there given an impulse to principles and to feelings which have led already to eighteen centuries of unmingled felicity. Brands plucked from the burning, and monuments of mercy, might thus be the fruits of his lessons. One may tread the graveyard, or the cloisters of the lonely lona, and commune in spirit with the lights of the world who once dwelt there: one may gaze on the Arch of Titus at Rome, and think of the dissolutions of which it tells the fulfilment of prophecy which it announces―Judea captive, and all her glory eclipsed or gone. But while loitering amid the ruins, or on the sea-beach of Pozzuoli, one feels far deeper emotions. Salvation is seen to be a more actual reality; the things unseen become more visible. When Paul was here, the monster Nero ruled the world-the servant of Christ was proceeding to Rome a prisoner. The shores of this beauteous bay were clothed with palaces in which luxury had piled up all its fascinations, and temples on which taste had lavished all its adornings. But these have all passed away-the gods and their fanes have equally crumbled into ruins-the unheeded prisoner, whose feet trod, and whose eye gazed on these scenes for seven successive days, was at that moment developing the principles at whose touch all was to totter and fall; and thus Baiæ, to the Christian's eye, is but a miniature of what the world will be when the truth as it is in Jesus shall have run its destined course. Society then wore the face of a goddess— all smiles and pleasures; but its heart has been rightly called that of a prostitute-all corruption and impurity. Destruction was the inevitable result of such a state of things; and Paul had come to plant the truth amid the foreseen ruins of that abode of mingled voluptuousness and superstition. The "paragon of animals," who was to Hamlet "the quintessence of dust," here held his court and highest revelries; and the being whom they despised is now alone the honoured! In the ear of faith all this proclaims, "Him that honoureth me I will honour, but he that despiseth me shall be lightly esteemed." The minions of the day are unknown as if another planet had been their home. The man whom they despised has now glory.

Nor should we fear, when we witness the triumphs of truth thus spread out before our eyes, that any of the purposes of the Eternal will fail. It seemed that Paul was but a puny instrument when pitted against the majesty of Rome-its despotism and world-wide ascendency. Yet all is prostrate now. We hear of it chiefly in the echoes of the wail awakened by its