Campanian city a kind of Rome-by-the-Sea. Lytton wrote the
novel some thirty years before the excavations of Pompeii had
been systematically begun; but his pictures of the life, the
luxuries, the pastimes and the gaiety of the half-Grecian
colony, its worship of Isis, its trade with Alexandria, and
the early struggles of Christianity with heathen superstition
are exceptionally vivid. The creation of Nydia, the blind
flower-girl, was suggested by the casual remark of an
acquaintance that at the time of the destruction of Pompeii
the sightless would have found the easiest deliverance.


_I.--The Athenian's Love Story_


Within the narrow compass of the walls of Pompeii was contained a
specimen of every gift which luxury offered to power. In its minute but
glittering shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre,
its circus--in the energy yet corruption, in the refinement yet the
vice, of its people, you beheld a model of the whole Roman Empire. It
was a toy, a plaything, a show-box, in which the gods seemed pleased to
keep the representation of the great monarchy of earth, and which they
afterwards hid from time, to give to the wonder of posterity--the moral
of the maxim, that under the sun there is nothing new.

Crowded in the glassy bay were vessels of commerce and gilded galleys
for the pleasures of the rich citizens. The boats of the fishermen
glided to and fro, and afar off you saw the tall masts of the fleet
under the command of Pliny.