Chapter VII: Part 7

“Nauvoo, mister,” said a tall gaunt man whom his friends addressed as “Major,” “Nauvoo is a pretty considerable sprig of a city. It is a tall place, sir. There air good points and great developments about Nauvoo. Do you settle down there, stranger? I could sell you a lot of land awful cheap.”

“Thank you,” said I, “I have no intention of becoming a resident at Nauvoo; I merely wish to visit it.”

“I see,” observed another guest; “you want to have a peep at the great temple the Mormons built before Joe Smith was shot at Springfield. ’Tain’t much you’ll see, though, stranger, for the place is all to ruin. The bhoys were not soft enough to let so much cedar-pine and dressed limestone stand, when houses were costing hat-fulls of dollars. But Nauvoo has some fine bluffs, con-sidered aiqual to any scenery the old Rhine can show.”

“Air you in the hardware line? If so, we might trade, I guess;” said a little man at my elbow.

“No, no;” I returned, “my journey is not of a commercial character, exactly.”

“Political, eh?” asked the Major: “picking up news, perhaps, for your Downing Street wiseacres, and feeling Uncle Sam’s pulse to know when the old gentleman is at fever heat, eh, mister?”

“Not at all,” said I; “I have no mission of the sort; nor, indeed, do I believe the British Government to entertain any peculiar anxiety on the subject you mention.”

A cough and shrug of disapprobation pervaded the assembly.

“It is well known, sir,” said the tall Major, “that the Government of your benighted land is ever on the watch for the expression of American opinion. American opinion, sir, has great weight in your House of Commons.”

“I was not aware of it, I give you my word;” I answered with a smile.

“Perhaps not, sir, perhaps not,” replied the Major, pityingly. “Do you never read the ‘Evening Planet,’ sir, when you are at home?”

I winced. The truth was, that I _did_ take in the ‘Evening Planet,’ and heedfully perused therein the valuable dicta of its eloquent proprietor, a celebrated parliamentary and platform orator. And I had been accustomed to give credence to the confident assurance of this gentleman, that we were miles behind the Northern States of the American Union in all that was useful and good, and that we could not do better than copy so shining a model in all things. I had read and heard the bold statement, made in defiance of statistics, that America was floating peacefully on the tide of prosperity into the haven of universal empire—an empire won by bloodless means, of course; for what nation, unsaddled with an aristocracy, would dream of war, while Britain was sinking into decrepitude and decay! All this, and much more, had I heard and read, and I had believed that Britannia ought to sit at the feet of her flighty offspring for instruction, and to remodel her old institutions after a republican pattern. But, as not seldom happens, a nearer view of the United States did not precisely confirm the loud assertions of the Americanising party in the British press and senate, and I was gradually losing my ideal admiration for transatlantic liberty and customs. After the rapid dinner, and the more leisurely supplement of juleps and brandy-cobblers imbibed in the bar-room of the hotel, I asked a coloured waiter if my waggon and mules were forthcoming, as I was desirous of reaching Nauvoo before dark.

“Iss, massa!” answered the negro, and whisked off with his napkin to inquire after the lingering equipage.

The Major said he was going to Nauvoo too, and begged the favour of a lift, which I willingly conceded.

The mules and waggon, with their whipcracking teamster, soon rattled up to the door; my bill was promptly paid, my baggage transferred to the vehicle; the Major and I climbed into our places, and we started.

“How comes it, Major,” said I, “that there is no line open to Nauvoo?”

The Major knocked the ashes off his cigar as he replied, “Wall, I suppose it wouldn’t pay. Rail to Fort Madison is all right and spry, because Uncle Sam has property there; but I guess not a dime could be drawed from Washington treasury to make a line on to Nauvoo.”

“And from Nauvoo, westward through Iowa, say to Nebraska,” observed I, with affected carelessness; “what should you say to the prospects of a railroad in that direction?”

My heart throbbed audibly as I spoke, for all my feigned indifference, and I listened with anxiety for the Major’s reply. I had not long to wait.

“That depends,” said my fellow-traveller, with sagacious deliberation, “on the sort of rail you talk about. Is it a line to go no farther than Wall Street, and perhaps your London Capel Court, that you are speaking of, mister?”

“Wall Street and Capel Court! Upon my life, I hardly comprehend you,” returned I.

“Moonshine, flummery, make-believe, sleepers, rails, stations, all of paper, _that’s_ what I mean, stranger;” rejoined the Major, somewhat impatiently.

“But I spoke of a _bona fide_ concern—of a real railway, honestly made and fairly worked,” answered I; “what would you say to that?”

“Say!” replied the Major, with infinite contempt, “say! Let me see the gonies. Trot ’em up to me, sir. Just let me have a look at the simple ones that are at the head of the business, and I’ll tell them what I think, fast enough. No, Nauvoo is a rising place, a neat location, but it can wait for a rail one while, unless every sage plant on the prairie turns to silver dollars.”

After this I asked the Major no more questions. We reached Nauvoo, and through the dusk I espied the shingled roofs of its houses, the bold bluffs of limestone, the rushing coffee-coloured river, and the unfinished building-lots with their heaps of wreck and rubbish. We put up at the General Jackson Hotel. I had a letter of introduction to Squire Park of Nauvoo, a gentleman in the flatboat interest, who owed his title of Squire to his being in the commission of the peace. But on repairing to his house I was doomed to disappointment—the more vexatious because Mr Park had been eulogised by Judge Tips as a man who knew the West thoroughly. Squire Park was gone to Cairo on business, and was not expected back before the end of the month. On consulting the map I carried, I found that a place called Keosauque was the nearest of the few towns in Iowa to the line of railway, real or imaginary, in connection with which my name, and those of other men of respectability and substance, were flaming, in advertisements and on the broadsheets of a prospectus, throughout the British metropolis. I set off to Keosauque, mounted on an Indian pony, and accompanied by a guide in the shape of a wiry backwoodsman, in an enduring costume of leather, and who gave accommodation to my portmanteau behind his saddle. For some miles we rode in silence over the apparently boundless sea of grass, mottled with weeds and flowers, and occasionally studded with lone farmhouses and maize fields, or by herds of grazing cattle. Those half-reclaimed mustangs are not the most pleasant mount for a timid rider, nor am I, George Bulkeley of Stamford Hill, a very adventurous horseman; and before we had got far, I began to wish the brute I rode would desist from what seemed an alternation of starts and stumbles. My guide, a good-humoured wild man, observed my embarrassment, and undertook its removal.

“See here, Colonel,” said he—strangers in the West are usually decorated with visionary epaulettes—“you mustn’t keep the rein so slack as that, nor yet hold your hand up level with your cravat, or, scalp me, but you’ll be spilt! Mustangs want a tight grip on the bit. So—steady now. Stick in your knees, Colonel, and scorn to ketch hold of the pummel—so. Do as you see me do; give him a touch of the spur, but mind his kicking—for mustangs _can_ kick, they can. You’ll do nicely, now.”

Ichabod was a skilful riding-master, by instinct, I suppose; and, thanks to his forcible instructions, I was soon on better terms with my refractory quadruped. On we rode, over the waving grass, through the rank weeds, through the belts of cottonwood timber and maples that skirted every streamlet, and past the swampy bottoms where sluggish waters wound like wounded snakes. We dined on dried venison, jerked beef, parched corn, and hominy, at a farm which did duty for an inn, and slept at another house of the same character. Next day we resumed our route; and as we rode towards Keosauque, I ventured to ask Ichabod if he had ever heard of the Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway. I had been hitherto averse to propounding this query; for how could I tell whether the interests of my informant might conflict with mine?—but with this rough frontiersman I felt I was safe. He, at least, was no rival speculator—no shareholder in a competing line—no steamboat proprietor, or lord of many stage-waggons. But his first answer was not satisfactory. It was comprised in the one word, “Anan!”

“The Railway”—asked I again—“from Nauvoo to Nebraska: not a finished thing, of course; but you surely must have seen or heard of the works—the bridges, the embankments, and the rest of the preparations?”

Ichabod shook his head. “You’re talking Greek to me, Colonel, and that air a fact.”

“How is it possible,” cried I, in an agony, “that there can have been a railway begun in this country, and the settlers unaware of it? Surely you must be a stranger to this part of the State yourself!”

“You’re wrong there, Colonel,” answered Ichabod; “I’m Illinois born, but I’m Iowa bred. In this State I was raised; and I don’t believe there’s a thing happened over the border sin’ I could mount a horse, be it buffler or deer, loping Indian, runaway nigger, or Yankee pedlar, without my hearing on’t. Stop” (and he smote his knee with a palm as hard as iron)—“I’ve got it. You’re talking of Harvey’s Folly.”

And I thought the young backwoodsman would have tumbled off his horse in the extravagant burst of mirth which this discovery produced. “Who-whoop!” cried he; “I’ve seen queer sights, but never did I think to see a stranger come out in a bee-line from the old country—no offence, Colonel!—to ax about Harvey’s Folly. I’d nigh forgot that the thing existed at all. Wah! but it beats coon-catching!”

With some trouble I got an explanation. It appeared from the borderer’s statement that, years ago, a speculative individual of the name of Harvey had undertaken to construct a railway from Nebraska to Nauvoo, with a branch linking it to the Central Illinois line. He had obtained the usual charter and grant of land from the State, and had actually commenced operations between Keosauque and New Buda, two little towns not far from the Missouri boundary. But he had soon desisted from the Sisyphean task, ruined, disheartened, or disappointed of the aid on which he had somewhat sanguinely reckoned; and thenceforth no more had been said of the scheme or the schemer. “But the property,” groaned I, “the works, surely _they_ must remain?”

“Why,” said Ichabod, meditatively, “I kinder think there’s rails laid down a bit—yes, for some miles I guess, and they’ll be there still. The cussed Indians can’t have stampedoed them, like they do the cattle. There’s a tidy bridge over a creek or two Harvey built, and some sheds and scantling; and that’s about all.”

“All,” said I, “think again, Ichabod. Surely there must be more plant than that, and then the rolling stock?”

The frontiersman laughed. “We know more about gunstocks than rolling stocks, out here on the pararas,” said he; “and I never heard of plants, onless ’twas hickory or sumach. But I’ve kinder catalogued the hull fixings for you, Colonel, without ’tis a pile of rusty iron, or a few waggon-loads of logs—neat bits of oak timber they were, trimmed and dressed, and shaped mighty like a saddle-tree, that Harvey left on the ground.”

“The sleepers, I suppose,” returned I; “are they there still?”

“Well, Colonel, mebbe some of ’em are taking a nap there still,” replied Ichabod, “but parara men often camp thereabouts, hunting, cattle-tending, or prospecting, and firewood being mortal scarce on the plains, ’twasn’t to be expected the bhoys wouldn’t make free with some chips to cook with. I may have had a chop at those logs with my tomahawk, when I wanted a broil, onst or twice, myself.”

I groaned again. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway was evidently as brittle a speculation as Alnaschar’s basket of glass. I finished the ride to Keosauque in moody reverie. There was no other guest to share such rugged plenty as the wooden tavern, called by courtesy the Eagle Hotel, could afford; and as the landlord was absent, and the landlady busy in the management of her children and Irish helps, no one talked to me, and I sat sullen and dejected the whole evening. Next day, tired as I was, I set out again, under Ichabod’s guidance, to visit what he persisted in naming Harvey’s Folly. We reached the spot at last. A swampy level, intersected by runlets of water, and with a good deal of thorny brake, and here and there a clump of cottonwood poplars diversifying the scene, had been selected by Mr Harvey for the site of his preliminary operations. Why he had chosen that wet ground at all, when so much dry prairie lay beyond, of very tolerable smoothness, it is difficult to conjecture; but perhaps the more accurate level had tempted him. There were rails, certainly there were rails, half-hidden by the growth of hemlocks and rank grass; but on dismounting I discovered that, for lack of proper metal trams, the rails had been constructed of _wood_, covered with a thin slip of iron—not an unusual device in out-of-the-way parts of America, as I was afterwards told. The fastenings were very defective, the sleepers loose, and the whole concern had a crazy haphazard look. Such as they were, these precious rails were continued for about 5 miles—5 miles out of 350!—and then they terminated in a mass of ruin and confusion. There were roofless sheds, scantlings and screens blown down by hurricane gusts, heaps of rusty iron, broken tools, damaged wheelbarrows, and a shattered truck with only one wheel left. Also there were a quantity of sleepers of dressed oak, and the fragments of many more, split by the axe and charred to coal, as they lay around the blackened spots of burnt turf, where many a camp-fire had been lit by the frontiersmen. That was all the valuable property left at the disposal of the directors. The sight sickened me. “Harvey’s Folly,” muttered I between my teeth, “say rather Bulkeley’s Folly—Bulkeley’s credulity, idiocy, weakness! And not only mine, but Tom Harris’s, and that of all of us. What a long-eared pack were we to be lured by the crafty piping of such a dissembling knave as that glib Colonel!” I rode away, sad and careworn. Ichabod’s quaint talk was unnoticed. I had another companion that claimed my undivided attention, and that was Care, Black Care, which sat crouching behind my saddle. I was haunted by a ghastly phantom of impending bankruptcy. The London Gazette spread its ill-omened sheet before me, and in its fatal columns I read, in flaming characters, “George Bulkeley, of Cannon Street in the City of London, and Stamford Hill, Middlesex, to surrender at Portugal Street on Monday the 14th inst. Official Assignee, Mr Wilks!” That it should have come to this! Ruin, ruin, ruin. Ruin and disgrace to us all, the duped directors of this wretched swindle. Were we not responsible for the debts of the undertaking? Was not the paid-up capital in the treacherous hands of our Yankee cashier, Dr Titus A. C. Bett, and could there be a doubt that it was lost for ever? Plainly the whole business was a fraudulent trick from the first—a net to catch gold-fish! Ah! already with my mind’s eye I saw the broker’s men in possession of Magnolia Villa; I saw my costly furniture, the cellar of wines I had been so proud of, carriages, pictures, everything, submitted to public competition by a smirking auctioneer. I heard the hammer fall, knocking down my Lares and Penates to the highest bidder. Going, going, gone! the accursed formula rang in my ears with baleful clearness. Magnolia Cottage to let! My family hiding in poor lodgings in Boulogne! George Bulkeley, a moody bankrupt, slinking about the pier of that refuge for insolvency, and afraid to face the Stock Exchange! Even though the Court might declare me blameless, even though the commissioner might whitewash me into commercial purity, my conscience was less complaisant, and sternly refused me even a third-class certificate.

I might have had the right to ruin myself and family, but what right had I to make desolate the hearths of many helpless and confiding people? How about those shareholders ignorant of business, those pinched vicars, needy widows, poor old half-pay officers, and the rest, who had been dazzled by our prospectus, and had invested their savings in the pocket of Dr Titus A. C. Bett? It was my respectable name, in common with those of my fellows in the Direction, which had baited the hook for such poor prey as these. My heart—even City men have hearts sometimes—was heavy and mournful with a grief not wholly selfish. Plump! fluff! down went the mustang on his knees, his feet having plunged into the holes that led to the dwellings of some “prairie-dogs”—interesting little brutes that burrow all over the plains—and over the animal’s head I flew with the force of a sky-rocket. Lighting with a great thump on the hard turf, I ran no trifling risk of a broken neck; but my hat saved me, at the expense of its own demolition, and I was only stunned. But when Ichabod hurried to the rescue he found me bruised and faint, and with a sprained thumb that caused me exquisite pain for the time. So stupified was I by the shock, that I did not hear the beat of hoofs upon the green carpet of the prairie, nor the sound of friendly voices, and was surprised, on looking up, to see that I was surrounded by a large party of equestrians, who were surveying me from the saddle with every appearance of interest. Riding-habits and side-saddles here in prairie-land! hats and feathers, too, of most ladylike elegance, and a pair of pretty, rather pale faces under the shadow of those plumed felts. Besides the two girls, there were a grey-haired elderly man, two younger gentlemen, and three or four mounted blacks in suits of striped cotton, one of whom led a couple of hounds in a long leash, while another had a buck strapped behind him on the horse.

“Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” asked one of the young ladies in a sweet kind voice. Ichabod, as bold as a lion in general, was awkward and bashful when addressed by a lady, and seemed to be weighing the words of his answer, when I felt it necessary to reply for myself. On discovering that I was a stranger in the land, General Warfield insisted that I should accompany the party to his house, just across the Missouri border, where my injured thumb should receive every attention, and where he and his family would gladly welcome me. Yielding willingly to this hospitable persuasion, I permitted Ichabod and one of the negroes to help me to remount my mustang, and we rode towards the Missouri boundary. The family whose acquaintance I had just made in so singular a way, bore no similarity to the travelling Americans whom it had previously fallen to my lot to encounter. General Warfield, his son, daughters, and nephew, had the well-bred air and unobtrusive demeanour which I had hitherto deemed exclusively insular. They asked me no abrupt questions as to my station or errand: they indulged in no diatribes against my country, nor in any extravagant laudations of their own; and I might have fancied myself the guest of some long-descended family at home, but for the wild scenes and unusual objects that met my eye as we rode along. It turned out that General Warfield, a retired military officer, _not_ a militiaman, was of an old Virginian family, and had migrated to the newer soil of Missouri six years ago. There his children had grown to be men and women, in the hardy habits of that wild country, a mere outpost of civilisation; and indeed they were returning from a hunting expedition into Iowa when they stumbled upon me in my prostrate condition. Three hours’ ride brought us to the General’s house, a large building of mingled wood and stone, with a pretty garden on one hand, and on the other the farm-buildings, the corrals for horses and cattle, and the negro huts. Within I found furniture of old-fashioned dark mahogany, partridge-wood, and bird’s-eye maple, old family pictures, pretty knickknacks picked up during a three years’ residence in Europe, and the massive silver plate which had been handed down from father to son ever since the ancestral Warfield settled in Virginia in the reign of Charles I. I never knew anything so _un_-American, in respect to the usual standard of comparison, as the mode of life, the bearing, and tastes, of General Warfield and his high-spirited and amiable children. Here was no exaggeration of sentiment, no outrageous national vanity, no rude indifference to the feelings of others, no prying, no pretension. I felt, as I conversed with them, how wide was the gulf that severed the North from the South. It was not diversity of interest alone, but diversity of habits, principles, and aspirations. Wide apart in heart and mind as the poles from each other, the citizens of the opposite ends of the Union had but the feeble Federal bond to delay that violent disruption and severance of which, even then, the signs of the times gave fearful warning. But it is not my purpose to linger on the happy days I spent beneath the roof of my kind hosts. Let me rather relate the information I received from General Warfield, when his friendly hospitality had caused me to confide to his ear my errand to America, and the ruin I had too much reason to anticipate.

“My dear sir,” said the General, “I am glad you have told me of this—very glad. I can help you in this matter.”

The General then proceeded to tell me that, in the first year of his residence in Missouri, Harvey, a notorious speculator, had begun the railway whose miserable wreck I had visited. He had given it up for want of funds, had become insolvent, and was reputed to have died in Texas. That he had received a real concession of land and authentic charters from the State legislatures, was undoubted. But the concession had been clogged by the express stipulation, that in two years Harvey should have a hundred and fifty miles in working order, and that the whole should be completed in four years. The condition not having been complied with, the concession was null and void. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway Company, had no right to a corporate existence.

“But,” said I, “I of course perused the papers. I saw no mention of such a conditional clause.”

The General smiled.

“Depend upon it, Mr Bulkeley,” said he, “that erasure and forgery have been practised to make the old deeds sufficiently tempting to effect the only purpose their present holders have in view—that of raising cash in the London market. Colonel Sling—who, by the way, is no more a colonel, even of militia, than black Cæsar there—is no novice at fraud. He was convicted at Jefferson city of a like offence, and I was present at his trial, and heard some of his antecedents; indeed, I was a witness in the case. But if you will take my advice, you will hasten back to England, and, if possible, save the funds in the hands of this confederate of his, this Bett, before the pair can abscond with their gains. Do not parley, but apply to the police at once, if, indeed, it be not too late.”

Finally, General Warfield was so good as to accompany me to the chief town of Iowa State, where he introduced me to the legal authorities, by whom his statements were fully confirmed, and the Nauvoo and Nebraska declared a transparent swindle. In this town we suddenly came on “Colonel” Sling, who had come out by the next packet, and was tracking me, no doubt in the hope of hoodwinking or silencing me in some mode or other. But when he saw the General, his swaggering air collapsed, a guilty crimson suffused his yellow cheeks, and he slunk away and entered a tavern without accosting us. And yet when, after giving hearty thanks to my kindly Virginian friend, I hurried to embark at New York, I had the honour of finding Colonel Coriolanus Sling, my fellow-passenger. He now ventured to address me, but by this time I was on my guard against his specious eloquence, and he retired with an air of mingled effrontery and shame. At Liverpool, as I took my seat in the train, which I did without the loss of a moment, I saw Colonel Sling dart into the telegraph office. So busy was my brain with what was before me, that I did not, during the principal part of the journey, attach any particular meaning to this proceeding of my treacherous ally. When I _did_ think of its probable object, I struck my forehead, and could have cursed my blind stupidity, my dulness of conception. After all my haste, scampering as quickly as possible to the station at Liverpool, was I to be too late, after all? Was this Yankee rascal to be permitted to warn his brother knave in London through my inattention, and was the paid-up capital to fatten the two harpies whose tools we had been? Heavy misgivings filled my heart as I arrived in London, hurried to Scotland Yard, and requested that a detective policeman might at once be ordered to accompany me to the residence of Dr Titus A. C. Bett, cashier to the Nauvoo and Nebraska Company. Luckily I was a man of credit and character in the city; my request was granted instantly, and off whirled the hansom cab, as fast as hansom cab could be impelled by the most lavish bribe, on its way to Piccadilly, bearing me and a quiet man with a resolute, thoughtful face, in plain clothes. Ha! there is a cab waiting at the door as we jump out—I hot and breathless, the policeman cool and steady. The gaping servant-girl belonging to the lodgings comes quickly at our knock. It is morning yet, early morning, from a London point of view—not much after nine.

“Is Dr Bett in?”

“Yes, sir,” replies the girl, “but he’s just a-going. He sent me out for the cab five minutes ago, and he’s called away so sudden he won’t take breakfast.”

“Ah, indeed!” says the detective; “telegram, I suppose, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the maid, “and he swore hawful because I hadn’t woke him up directly it came, two hour ago, along with the milk, but I didn’t dare, ’cause he always stops out late, and always swears and scolds if I bring up his hot water before nine o’clock.”

I could have hugged that maid, Mary Ann, Eliza, or Susan, no matter what, for she was my preserver—a most valuable but unwitting ally. I did give her a sovereign as I bade her show us up. We found the Doctor, unshaved, half dressed, tugging at his boots, and with a leather dressing-case weighty with gold and notes lying on the table at his elbow. We rushed in with scant ceremony. The detective tapped him on the shoulder and took him into custody with the magic formula of uttering her Majesty’s name. The bubble burst, but the funds were saved; and after some expense, ridicule, and trouble, we were able to return their money to the shareholders, and I washed my hands most gladly of my American investment.

THE LANDSCAPE OF ANCIENT ITALY, AS DELINEATED IN THE POMPEIAN PAINTINGS.

“Und aber nach zweitausend Jahren
Kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.”

“Et puis nous irons voir, car décadence et deuil
Viennent toujours après la puissance et l’orgueil,
Nous irons voir....”

We are so much accustomed to depend on the four great literary languages for the whole body of our information and amusement, that it occurs to few to consider that ignorance of other European dialects involves any inconvenience at all, except to those who have occasion to visit the countries in which they are spoken. Yet there is much of really valuable matter which sees the light only in the minor tongues, especially those of the industrious North, and with which the world has never been made familiar through translation. Joachim Frederic Schouw, the Danish botanist, is one of the writers of our day who has suffered most prejudicially both to his own fame and to the public from having employed only his native language. For his writings are not only valuable in a scientific point of view, but belong to the most popular order of scientific writing, and would assuredly have been general favourites, had not the bulk of them remained untranslated. His ‘Tableau du Climat de l’Italie’ has, however, appeared in French, and is a standard work. A little collection of very brief and popular essays, entitled ‘The Earth, Plants, and Man,’ has been translated both into German and English. One of these, styled ‘The Plants of Pompeii,’ is founded on a rather novel idea. The paintings on the walls of the disinterred houses of that city contain (among other things) many landscape compositions. Sometimes these are accessory to historical representations. But they often merely portray the scenery of ordinary out-door life. The old decorators of the Pompeian chambers had indeed an evident taste for those trivial tricks of theatrical deception, which are still very popular in Italy. Their verdure, sky, and so forth, seem often as if meant to impose on the spectator for a moment as realities; and are, therefore, executed in a “realistic” though sketchy style. “Consequently,” says Schouw, “the observation of the plants which are represented in these paintings will give, as far as they go, the measure of those which were familiar to the ancient eye, and will help to show the identities and the differences between the vegetation of the Campanian plains a hundred years after Christ, and that which adorns them now.”

We propose to follow the Professor through this confined but elegant little chapter of his investigations. But by restraining ourselves to this alone, we should be dealing with only part of a subject. In most regions, two thousand years have made considerable changes in the appearance of the vegetable covering of the earth; but in that land of volcanic influences in which Pompeii stood, great revolutions have taken place, during that time, in the structure of the ground itself. Sea and land have changed places; mountains have risen and sunk; the very outlines and main landmarks of the scene are other than what they were. Let us for a moment imagine ourselves gazing with Emperor Tiberius from his “specular height” on precipitous Capri, at that unequalled panorama of sea and land formed by the Gulf of Naples, as thence descried, and note in what respects the visible face of things has changed since he beheld it.

The central object in his view, as in that of the modern observer, was Vesuvius, standing out a huge insulated mountain mass, unconformable with the other outlines of the landscape, and covered then, as now, with its broad mantle of dusky green. Then, as now, its volcanic soil was devoted to the cultivation of the vine. But in other respects its appearance was widely different. No slender, menacing column of smoke rose perpetually from its summit. Nor was it lurid, at night, with that red gleam of the slow river of fire,

“A cui riluce
Di Capri la marina
E di Napoli il porto e Mergellina.”

It was an extinct volcano, and had been so for unknown ages. Nor did it exhibit its present characteristic cone, nor probably its double top; Vesuvius and Somma were most likely one; and the deep half-moon-shaped ravine of the Atrio del Cavallo, which now divides them, is thought to be a relic of the ancient crater. That crater was a huge amphitheatrical depression, several miles in circuit, filled with pasture-lands and tangled woods. Spartacus and his servile army had used it not long before as a natural fortress. But this feature was scarcely visible to the spectator at Capri, opposite the mountain, to whom the summit must have appeared as a broad flat-topped ridge, in shape and height very similar to the Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.

At the time in question, scarcely a few vague traditions remained to record the fact that the mountain had once “burnt.” The fiery legends of Magna Græcia related to the country west of Naples, where volcanic action had been more recent: the Phlegræan fields, the Market-place of Vulcan (Solfatara), the cone of Gnarime (Ischia), through which the imprisoned Typhœus breathed flame, from whence he has been since transferred to Vesuvius, as a Genoese monk informed us when we and he first looked on that volcano together. Vesuvius awoke from his sleep of unknown length, as every one knows, in A.D. 79, when he celebrated his resumption of authority by that grand “extra night” of the 24th August, which has had no rival since, in the way of pyrotechnical entertainment, except on the distant shores of Iceland, the West Indies, and the Moluccas. His period of activity lasted nearly a thousand years. Then he relapsed into lethargy for six hundred. In 1631, he had resumed (as old prints show), something nearly resembling the form which we have attributed to him in classical times. His top, of great height, swollen up by the slow accumulation of burning matter, without a vent, was a level plateau, with a pit-like crater, filled with a forest of secular oaks and ilexes: only a few “fumaroles,” or smoke-holes, remained here and there to attest his real character. Even the legends of his conflagrations had become out of date. The old “Orearch” or mountain-spirit, Vesevus, is portrayed by the local poet Pontanus in the fifteenth century, as a rustic figure, with a bald head, hump back, and cincture of brushwood—all fiery attributes omitted. Even his terrible name was only known to the learned: the people called him the “Monte di Somma.” The suburban features of a great luxurious city, convents, gardens, vineyards, hunting-grounds, and parks of the nobility, had crept again up the sides of the mountain, until they almost mingled with the trees on the summit. The approaching hour was not without its premonitory signs, many and strange. The phenomena which Bulwer makes his witch of Vesuvius recount, by way of warning, to Arbaces, are very closely borrowed from contemporary narratives of the eruption of 1631. Nor were the omens of superstition wanting, accommodated to the altered feelings of the times. At the Plinian eruption, the people imagined that the old giants buried in the Phlegræan fields had risen again, and renewed their battle with the gods: “for many phantoms of them,” says Dio Cassius, “were seen in the smoke, and a blast, as of trumpets, was heard.” In 1631, carriages full of devils were seen to drive, and battalions of diabolical soldiers to gather in marching array along the precipitous flanks of the mountain. The footsteps of unearthly animals were tracked on the roads. “A peasant of the name of Giovanni Camillo” (so we are informed by the Jesuit Giulio Cesare Recupito, a contemporary), “had passed Easter Eve at a farm-house of his own on the mountain. There, without having taken a mouthful of anything, he was overtaken by a profound slumber, from which awakening suddenly, he saw no longer before his eyes the likeness of the place where he had fallen asleep, but a new heaven, a new soil, a new landscape: instead of a hill-side covered with wood, there appeared a wall crossing the road, and extending on each side for a great distance, with a very lofty gate. Astonished at this new scene, he went to the gate to inquire where he was. There he found a porter of the order of St Francis, a young man in appearance. Many conjecture that this was St Antony of Padua. The porter at first seemed to repulse him, but afterwards admitted him into the courtyard, and guided him about. After a long circuit they arrived at a great range of buildings breathing fire from every window.” In short, the poor peasant was conducted, after the fashion of such visions, through the mansions of hell and purgatory, where he saw, of course, many of his acquaintance variously tormented. “At last, on the following day, he was restored to himself, and to Vesuvius: and was ordered to inform his countrymen that a great ruin was impending over them from that mountain: wherefore they should address their vows and prayers to God. On Easter Day, at noon, he came home, and was observed of many with his dress sprinkled with ashes, his face burnt black, as if escaped from a fire.” This was two years before the eruption, and during the interval Camillo always told the same story; wherefore, after passing a long time for either mad or drunk, he was finally raised to the dignity of a prophet. At last, on the night of the 15th December, the ancient volcano signalised his awakening by a feat of unrivalled grandeur. In forty-eight hours of terrific struggles, he blew away the whole cap of the mountain; so that, on the morning of the 18th, when the smoke at last subsided, the Neapolitans beheld their familiar summit a thousand feet lower than it had been before; while its southern face was seamed by seven distinct rivers of fire, slowly rolling at several points into the sea.

Since 1631, the frequency, if not the violence, of the eruptions seems to have gradually increased, and Vesuvius is probably more “active” now, in local language, than at any former time in his annals, having made the fortunes of an infinity of guides and miscellaneous waiters on Providence within the last twelve years, besides burning a forest or two, and expelling the peasantry of some villages. But his performances on a grand scale seem for the present suspended. Frequent eruptions prevent that accumulation of matter which produces great ones. Indeed, the late Mr Laing, whose ‘Notes of a Traveller’ show him to have been that identical “sturdy Scotch Presbyterian whig” who visited Oxford in company with Lockhart’s Reginald Dalton, “reviling all things, despising all things, and puffing himself up with all things,” deliberately pronounced the volcano a humbug, and believed the depth of its subterranean magazines to be extremely trifling. Still, the curious traveller, like that fabulous Englishman who visited the lion-tamer every night for the chance of seeing him devoured, cannot help looking with a certain eagerness for the occurrence of those two interesting catastrophes, of which the day and hour are written down in the book of the Fates—that combination of high tide, west wind, and land-flood, which is to drown St Petersburg; that combination of south-east wind and first-class eruption which is to bury Naples in ashes. This finale seemed nearer in that recent eruption of December 1860, which spent its fury on Torre del Greco, than perhaps on any former occasion; but once more the danger passed away.

To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived. Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity, was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the _malaria_. But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore. The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were, doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven centuries previous to A.D. 1000; then the reverse movement took place until about A.D. 1500: and the land is now sinking again. If so, these marine palaces must have gradually subsided into the sea, and their owners may have been driven out by the invasion of cuttle-fish and sea-hedgehogs, and other monsters of the Mediterranean shallows, in their best bedrooms, even before Norman or Saracen incursions had reduced them to desolation. But whatever the cause of their disappearance, they had vanished before modern history began: nor has modern luxury, in its most profuse mood, ever sought to reproduce them. Their submarine ruins remain as memorials of ages when men were at all events more daring and earnest in their extravagance, and the “lust of the eye and the pride of life” were deified on a grander scale, than at any other epoch of the world’s history.

Naples herself, the “idle” and the “learned” (for the ancients called her somewhat inconsistently by both epithets, nor had she as yet acquired her more recent soubriquet of the “beautiful”), formed a far less conspicuous object in the view than now; it was a place of some twenty or thirty thousand souls, according to Niebuhr’s conjectural estimate; confined between the modern Mole on the one hand, and the Gate del Carmine on the other; and nestling close in the neighbourhood of the sister city Herculaneum. The lofty line of the houses on the Chiaia—of which you may now almost count the windows in the top storeys from the sea-level at Capri, through that pellucid atmosphere, while the lower storeys are hidden by the earth’s curvature—did not then exist. But instead of it there extended the endless terraces and colonnades, the cypress avenues and plane groves, of that range of fortress-palaces erected by Pollio and Lucullus, enlacing island, and beach, and ridge, even to the point of Posilippo, with tracery of dazzling marble. Here, however, the mere natural changes have been small, except that an island or two (like that of the Castel dell’ Uovo) has since been joined to the continent. But farther west, round the Bay of Baiæ, fire and water have dealt most fantastically with the scenery. Scarcely a prominent feature on which the Roman eye rested remains unchanged. Quiet little Nisida was a smoking semi-volcano. Yonder level dun-coloured shore, from Pozzuoli to the Lucrine, was under water, and the waves dashed against a line of cliff now some miles inland. That crater-shaped Lake of Agnano, now the common resort of Neapolitan holiday-makers, did not exist; it must have been formed by some unrecorded convulsion of the dark ages. Yonder neatly truncated cone, rising five hundred feet above the plain, seems as permanent a feature in the landscape as any other of the “everlasting hills;” but it was the creation of a few days of violent eruption, only three centuries ago—as its name of Monte Nuovo still indicates—whether by “upheaval” or by “ejection,” philosophers dispute. But the beautiful Lucrine Lake, the station of Roman fleets and the very central point of Roman luxury, disappeared in the same elemental commotion; leaving a narrow stagnant pool behind. Only yon slight dyke or barrier of beach, between this shrunken mere and the sea, deserves respect; for that has remained, strange to say, almost unaltered throughout. It is one of the very oldest legendary spots of earth; doubtless the very road along which Hercules dragged the oxen of Geryon; the very “narrow shore” on which Ulysses landed, in order to call up the melancholy shades of the dead. Farther inland, again, Avernus remains unchanged, in shape at least; but many and strange are the revolutions which it has undergone in other respects. We first hear of it as a dark pool, surrounded by forests; the bed, doubtless, of an ancient crater filled with water, and retaining much of volcanic action; but not (as commonly supposed) fatal to the birds that flew over it. That notion is not classical; or rather, it is founded on a misconception of classical authorities. The pool is not called by the best writers “lacus Avernus” but “lacus Averni,” the lake _of_ the Avernus. What is an Avernus? Lucretius tells us that it is a spot where noxious gases escape from the earth, so that the birds which fly over it fall dead on the earth _or_ into the lake if there happens to be a lake below them.

“Si forte lacus substratus Averno est.”

And Virgil’s description, accurately construed, gives exactly the same meaning.

“Spelunca alta fuit....
....tuta lacu nigro nemorum que tenebris,
_Quam_ super” (not quem super, over the cavern, not the lake)
....“haud ullæ poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis....
Unde _locum_” (not _lacum_) “Graii dixerunt nomine Aornon.”

It was the exhalations from the mysterious cavern that were deadly, not those from the lake. Such an “Avernus” is the “Gueva Upas” or Valley of Death, in Java, to which condemned criminals were formerly sent to perish; whence the romance about the Upas Tree. And such an Avernus, on a small scale, still exists on the shore of the peaceful little Lake of Laach in Germany, also an extinct crater: there are spots on its beach where bird-corpses are to be found in numbers, killed by mephitic exhalations. But—to return to our lake—it must at that time have lain at or (like some other extinct craters) below the level of the sea; for Augustus’s great engineering operation consisted in letting the sea _into_ the lake.

“Tyrrhenusque fretis immittitur æstus Avernis.”

Fifteen hundred years afterwards, and just before the Monte Nuovo eruption, the place was visited by that painful old topographer, Leandro Alberti, the Leland of Italy. The channel made by Augustus was then gone; but the lake was still on a level with the sea, for he asserts that in storms the sea broke into it: and the water, as he expressly affirms, was salt. Now, its level is several feet above that of the sea, and the water is fresh. The upheaval must have been gradual and peaceful, for the outline of the lonely mere is as perfectly rounded now as the poet Lycophron described it;—but a portion only of that bewildering succession of changes of which this coast has been the theatre: the latest vibration of that vast commotion figured in the legendary war of the Giants. Nor is it quite so wild a conjecture as some have deemed it, that the tradition which peopled this bright coast with Cimmerians—then dwellers in the everlasting mist, on the border-land between the dead and the living—had its origin in the tales of primeval navigators, who had visited the neighbourhood during some mighty and prolonged eruption, covering sea and shore with a permanent darkness which “might be felt:” like the coast of Iceland in 1783, when for a whole summer continual eruptions arose from the sea as well as the land: when “the noxious vapours that for many months infected the air, enveloped the whole island in a dense fog which obscured the sun, and was perceptible even in England and Holland.”

Still farther westward in our panoramic view, the confusion between past and present becomes even more undecipherable. Baiæ has disappeared; a stately city of pleasure, which, to judge by its remaining foundations, rose on a hillside in terraces, something like its British counterpart Bath, but with its foot washed by the Mediterranean instead of the Avon: so has Misenum, with its naval station: and not only are these towns gone, but the land on which they stood seems so to have changed its shape, through earthquakes, marine encroachments, and the labour of men, that its very outlines are altered, until the eye rests at last on the peak of Ischia, which ends the semicircle.

Thus much by way of introduction to the more immediate point of our inquiry: the changes in the general aspect and character of the earth’s vegetable covering which have taken place in the same period of two thousand years, and in the same locality.