Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1899-03-11 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

BANKER.  I The systematic excavations at the ruined city lof Pompeii continue to reveal additional evidence !both of the luxurious habits of the ancient Romans, and the attractive elegance and refinement of the majority of their mural decorations, and I also of the terrible horrors of the sudden and I awful doom which befell the fated city. I After lying buried beneath the ashes and scorlie of Vesuvius for nearly seventeen centuries, this hidden city, suddenly struck in the midst of its business activity, its barbarous amusements, its philosophical discussions, and its depraved dissipations, is at length exhumed from its long-imprisoned concealment, and the everyday his of its citizens, so suddenly arrested by the great catastrophe, is exhibited to us in the most startling manner, proving that the account of the cal-amity written by an eye-witness, Pliny, who succeeded in escaping. from the doomed city, was hot at all exaggerated. Everyone is familiar with the details of the entombment of this city of luxury' the sudden darkness' supervening upon the violent eruption of the angry volcano, the hail of mud and ashes rendering locomotion almost impossible, tee roar and tumult of the tremendous outburst, and worst of all, the descent of dense and ponderous clouds of choking volcanic dust, which accumulated higher and higher in the streets, compelling the wretched victims who were essaying to esioaPo to flee into the nearest dwelling house for shelter; a refuge from which they never emerged until the presentment of their contorted bodies is now removed, to find another renting place within a glass case in a museum. And no wonder these apparently petrified I figures (the majority are but plaster casts of the eatural moulds formed by the indurated mud) exhibit such traces of the death throes of horror in which they succumbed; some battling for life in the choking darkness, their lists clenched and their limbs contorted; young girls crouching down, with a veil wound round their faces to protect them from the opaque dust which is rapidly suifilx-ating them; matrons apparently resigning themselves to their We and passing away without a struggle; perhaps some Christian converts, doubtless gladly going to meet Dim who had consented to be punished in their stead. said through whose propitiate saerifioe the record of their sins has been expunged; and Roman sentries refusing to quit their post even though certain death awaited them. And amidst all the seven hundred or more traces of coxpees whiob so far have been discovered, innumerable indications have been observed of the terrible suddenness of the destruction. Men encumbered with " the weight of the treasure they hoped to save. unable further to proceed, sink down in the ashes. while their idolized wealth which had destroyed them is left to be recovered by explorers seventeen centuries later in time. In encilese cases this has apparently happened, for in the immediate proximity of ekelotons, coins, jewellery, precious stones, valuable orraments, and other portable property have repeatedly been found, the owner evidently having perished in the attempt to save them. And as the spectator contemplates the long line of apparently petrified bodies of ancient Roman men, women, and children, suddenly cut off in the midst ot life, horror impressed upon their stony visages. the death-agony evidenced in their contorted end struggling limbs, victims of an appalling outburst of destructive natural forces, and, as he reflects that perhaps some of these had been recovered from the adjoining amphitheatre, at which, it is stated, some spectacle was in progress , at the time of the disaster—perhaps an exhibition of the martyrdom of a number of devoted Christians—be could not refrain from the consideration that the fate of those faithful martyrs whose lives bad been torn from them by lien or wolfhound, was infinitely preferable to that of their cruel and profligate heathen persecutors. For they were wearing a martyr-crown of glory, while the spirits of their oppressors and murderers were being tormented with the fire of bitter remorse, and the dread of still more crushing punislimena on the Great Day when the record of their misdoings is to be unfolded before the Judge, by their pitiless Accuser.