may,
perhaps, commiserate the unhappy fate of beings condemned to inhabit a
planet during its nascent and chaotic state, and feel grateful that
their favored race has escaped such scenes of anarchy and misrule.

Yet what was the real condition of Campania during those years of dire
convulsion? "A climate where heaven's breath smells sweet and
wooingly--a vigorous and luxuriant nature unparalleled in its
productions--a coast which was once the fairy-land of poets, and the
favorite retreat of great men. Even the tyrants of the creation loved
this alluring region, spared it, adorned it, lived in it, died in
it."[559] The inhabitants, indeed, have enjoyed no immunity from the
calamities which are the lot of mankind; but the principal evils which
they have suffered must be attributed to moral, not to physical,
causes--to disastrous events over which man might have exercised a
control, rather than to the inevitable catastrophes which result from
subterranean agency. When Spartacus encamped his army of ten thousand
gladiators in the old extinct crater of Vesuvius, the volcano was more
justly a subject of terror to Campania, than it has ever been since the
rekindling of its fires.

CHAPTER XXV.

ETNA.

External physiognomy of Etna--Lateral cones--Their successive
obliteration--Early eruptions--Monti Rossi in 1669--Towns overflowed
by lava--Part of Catania overflowed--Mode of advance of a current of
lava--Subterranean caverns--Marine strata at base of Etna--Val del
Bove not an ancient crater--Its scenery--Form, composition, and
origin of the dikes--Linear direction of cones formed in 1811 and
1819--Lavas and breccias--Flood produced by the melting of snow by
lava--Glacier covered by a lava stream--Val del Bove how
formed--Structure and origin of the cone of Etna--Whether the
inclined sheets of lava were originally horizontal--Antiquity of
Etna--Whether signs of diluvial waves are observable on Etna.

_External physiognomy of Etna._--After Vesuvius, our most authentic
records relate to Etna, which rises near the sea in solitary grandeur to
the height of nearly eleven thousand feet.[560] The base of the cone is
almost circular, and eighty-seven English miles in circumference; but if
we include the whole district over which its lavas extend, the circuit
is probably twice that extent.

_Divided into three regions._--The cone is divided by nature into three
distinct zones,