sort will be found in the museum at Portici, both in clay and bronze, but especially the latter; and as the ornaments of the ancients have generally some reference to some particular things, we often meet with rather remarkable subjects.”  A considerable number of these articles will be found in the British Museum, but they are chiefly of the commoner sort.  All the works, however, descriptive of Herculaneum and Pompeii, present us with specimens of the richer and more remarkable class, which attract admiration both by the beauty of the workmanship, and the whimsical variety of their designs.  We may enumerate a few which occur in a work now before us, “Antiquites d’Herculanum,” in which we find a Silenus, with the usual peculiarities of figure ascribed to the jolly god rather exaggerated, and an owl sitting upon his head between two huge horns, which support stands for lamps.  Another represents a flower-stalk, growing out of a circular plinth, with snail-shells hanging from it by small chains, which held the oil and wick.  The trunk of a tree, with lamps suspended between the branches.  Another, a naked boy, beautifully wrought, with a lamp hanging from one hand, and an instrument for trimming it from the other, the lamp itself representing a theatrical mask.  Beside him is a twisted column, surmounted by the head of a Faun, or Bacchanal, which has a lid in its crown, and seems intended as a reservoir of oil.  The boy and pillar are both placed on a square plateau, raised upon lions’ claws.  But, beautiful as those lamps are, the light which they gave must have been weak and unsteady, and little superior to that of common street-lamps, with which indeed they are identical in principle.  The wick was merely a few twisted threads, drawn through a hole in the upper surface of the oil-vessel; and there was no glass to steady the light, and prevent its varying with every breeze that blew.

Still, though the Romans had not advanced so far in art as to apply glass-chimneys and hollow circular wicks to their lamps, they had experienced the inconvenience of going home at night through a city ill-paved, ill-watched, and ill-lighted, and, accordingly, soon invented lanterns to meet the want.  These we learn from Martial, who has several epigrams upon this subject, were made of horn or bladder;—­no mention, we believe, occurs, of glass being thus employed.  The rich were preceded by a slave bearing their lantern.  This, Cicero mentions, as being the habit of Catiline upon his midnight expeditions; and when M. Antony was accused of a disgraceful intrigue, his lantern-bearer was tortured, to extort a confession whither he had conducted his master.[4] One of these machines, of considerable ingenuity and beauty of workmanship, was found in Herculaneum in 1760, and another, almost exactly the same, at Pompeii, a few years after.