not be simply considered as a polite expression, but as an invocation of hospitality.  The rooms are singularly narrow, and badly lighted; the windows do not look on the street, but on a portico inside the house, as well as a marble court which it surrounds.  In the midst of this court is a cistern, simply ornamented.  It is evident from this kind of habitation that the ancients lived almost entirely in the open air, and that it was there they received their friends.  Nothing gives us a more sweet and voluptuous idea of existence than this climate, which intimately unites man with nature; we should suppose that the character of their conversation and their society, ought, with such habits, to be different from those of a country where the rigour of the cold forces the inhabitants to shut themselves up in their houses.  We understand better the Dialogues of Plato in contemplating those porches under which the ancients walked during one half of the day.  They were incessantly animated by the spectacle of a beautiful sky:  social order, according to their conceptions, was not the dry combination of calculation and force, but a happy assemblage of institutions, which stimulated the faculties, unfolded the soul, and directed man to the perfection of himself and his equals.

Antiquity inspires an insatiable curiosity.  Those men of erudition who are occupied only in forming a collection of names which they call history, are certainly divested of all imagination.  But to penetrate the remotest periods of the past, to interrogate the human heart through the intervening gloom of ages, to seize a fact by the help of a word, and by the aid of that fact to discover the character and manners of a nation; in effect, to go back to the remotest time, to figure to ourselves how the earth in its first youth appeared to the eyes of man, and in what manner the human race then supported the gift of existence which civilization has now rendered so complicated, is a continual effort of the imagination, which divines and discovers the finest secrets that reflection and study can reveal to us.  This occupation of the mind Oswald found most fascinating, and often repeated to Corinne that if he had not been taken up with the noblest interests in his own country, he could only have found life supportable in those parts where the monuments of history supply the place of present existence.  We must at least regret glory when it is no longer possible to obtain it.  It is forgetfulness alone that debases the soul; but it may find an asylum in the past, when barren circumstances deprive actions of their aim.

On leaving Pompei and returning to Portici, Corinne and Lord Nelville were surrounded by the inhabitants, who cried to them loudly to come and see the mountain; so they call Vesuvius.  Is it necessary to name it?  It is the glory of the Neapolitans and the object of their patriotic feelings; their country is distinguished by this phenomenon.  Oswald had Corinne carried in a kind of palanquin as far as the hermitage of St Salvador, which is half way up the mountain, and where travellers repose before they undertake to climb the summit.  He rode by her side to watch those who carried her, and the more his heart was filled with the generous thoughts that nature and history inspire, the more he adored Corinne.