Page:The Last Days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton - Volume 1.djvu/11



visiting those disinterred remains of an ancient City, which, more perhaps than either the delicious breeze or the cloudless sun, the violet valleys and orange groves, of the South, attract the traveller to the neighbourhood of Naples; on viewing, still fresh and vivid, the houses, the streets, the temples, the theatres of a place existing in the haughtiest age of the Roman empire,—it was not unnatural, perhaps, that a writer who had before laboured, however unworthily, in the art to revive and to create, should feel a keen desire to people once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the bones which were yet spared to his survey; to traverse the gulph of eighteen centuries, and to wake to a second existence—the City of the Dead!

And the reader will easily imagine how sensibly this desire grew upon one who felt he could per-