had been vigorously resumed were pushed on by as many as seven hundred
laborers at a time, and they dug out in the lapse of three years more
treasures than had been brought to light in the thirty that preceded
them. Everything has been reformed, nay, _moralised_, as it were, in the
dead city; the visitor pays two francs at the gate and no longer has to
contend with the horde of guides, doorkeepers, rapscallions, and beggars
who formerly plundered him. A small museum, recently established,
furnishes the active inquirer the opportunity of examining upon the spot
the curiosities that have already been discovered; a library containing
the fine works of Mazois, of Raoul Rochette, of Gell, of Zahn, of
Overbeck, of Breton, etc., on Pompeii, enables the student to consult
them in Pompeii itself; workshops lately opened are continually busy in
restoring cracked walls, marbles, and bronzes, and one may there
surprise the artist Bramante, the most ingenious hand at repairing
antiquities in the world, as likewise my friend, Padiglione, who, with
admirable patience and minute fidelity, is cutting a small model in cork
of the ruins that have been cleared, which is scrupulously exact. In
fine--and this is the main point--the excavations are no longer carried
on occasionally only, and in the presence of a few privileged persons,
but before the first comer and every day, unless funds have run short.

"I have frequently been present," wrote a half-Pompeian, a year or two
ago, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_--"I have frequently been present for
hours together, seated on a sand-bank which itself, perhaps, concealed
wonders, and witnessed this rude yet interesting toil, from which I
could not withdraw my gaze. I therefore have it in my power to write
understandingly. I do not relate what I read, but what I saw. Three
systems, to my knowledge, have been employed in these excavations. The
first, inaugurated under Charles III., was the simplest. It consisted in
hollowing out the soil, in extricating the precious objects found, and