long become an abode of
cultured leisure. Within the closely packed streets of the town itself
there were to be found few open spaces except the Forum, and perhaps a
small park in front of the amphitheatre, for the place was prosperous,
though not wealthy, and its chief citizens were forced to remain content
with the tiny gardens enclosed within the walls of their own dwellings.

Internally Pompeii presented, like many another Roman town, marks of its
six hundred years of existence. There was at least one perfect Doric
temple; there were Oscan-Grecian buildings, notably the so-called "House
of the Surgeon," with its air of old-fashioned simplicity; there were
houses of the Republican period; there were numberless dwellings of the
Imperial era; there were unfinished structures that were being completed
at the time of the city's overthrow. For, sixteen years before Vesuvius
suddenly awoke from its long sleep, the neighbourhood had been visited by
the severe earthquake shock of 63, and the effects produced by this
disaster had not nearly been effaced, when the great event of 79
transformed the town into a huge museum for the delight and instruction of
future generations. Pompeii therefore preserves the marks of more than
half a thousand years of civilization, so that those who will take the
necessary trouble can trace within its area the gradual progress of its
social and political life from the far-off days of Greeks and Oscans to
the reign of the Emperor Titus. The case of a ruined Exeter or Shrewsbury
could not be widely different. The students of ensuing ages would be able
to find in the dead town one or two churches of Norman or Plantagenet
times; portions of medieval city walls and gateways, perhaps even some
undoubted traces of Roman baths or fortifications; some few public
buildings erected under Tudor or Stuart sovereigns; a large number of the
plain roomy mansions of the Georgian period; and, last of all, a
preponderating quantity of nineteenth century structures of every
description--churches, warehouses, factories, inns, barracks, shops,
dwelling-houses. Many would be the inscriptions and monuments we should
find in such a town, alluding to private and public persons utterly
unknown to English history, but more or less noteworthy in local annals:
grandees of civic life, soldiers, philanthropists, clergymen, _et hoc
genus omne_. Future generations of scholars would doubtless strive eagerly
to obtain details of t