290 The Man of Ill-Omen. [Sept. 



fifty times their value to my much-enduring and wcll-plandLTcd coun- 

 trymen. The mountain was still tardy in its performances, and I was 

 not unwilling to wait its leisure. A roar like that of distant artillery 

 now and then gave signs that the battle was at hand ; and then died away, 

 as if the belligerent "spirits of the mountain had made up their quar- 

 rels, and, like continental kings, were satisfied with having made fools 

 of the English. But the mountain -mania was as wild in Sorrento as in 

 the Strada di Toledo. Every living soul was full of it, and every one 

 seemed to have registered life only by the movements of this paragon of 

 fireworks. " It is twenty years since we have had an eruption !" said a 

 monk loaded with flesh and sanctity, as he toiled along under my win- 

 dow, counting his beads. " It is twenty years since we had an eruption!" 

 resounded a troop of peasants, hurrying to market with their water- 

 melons. " It is twenty years since we had an eruption !" was the 

 cry of the four postihons of an English duke and his suite, as they 

 rushed by, clattering their whips, and raising a dust that almost hid 

 Vesuvius itself. All the world were moving up the mountain like 

 swarms of ants ; covering every gully and gorge of the mighty pyramid, 

 and all crying out the same words. I grew tired of this, too ; and, 

 tnrnin o- away from the scene of clamour and science, went unphilosophically 

 to take my rest, and enjoy the shade of an enormous vine that, in defiance 

 of training and trellises, hung down to the water's-edge. The " twenty 

 years" cry was still in my ears ; and I was trying to get rid of it by the 

 ■wise occupation of thinking what absurdity had brought me a thousand 

 miles, only to be choked with dust, and die of the popular scream of a 

 rabble of "Neapolitans, when I heard it repeated at my side. I started 

 up more angrily than became a sage. But the fellow's look was not 

 one to give iTiuch ground for hostihty. lie was a jocular- visaged rogue, 

 half in rags ; but rags are no sign of humiliation in the southern para- 

 dise. The face had been handsome ; the eye was still bright and black 

 as jet ; and the remains of the figure— for he had lost a leg — were those 

 of a Hercules. In England, this fellow would have been a sturdy beg- 

 o-ar, hunted by constables, and convertible into a highwayman on occa- 

 sion. But he was here in a congenial land, privileged to all the pleasures 

 of freedom, and living at his ease on the revenues of a cracked guitar. 

 He approached me with the bow of a courtier, prefacing his entreaty 

 by telling me that " it was twenty years since there had been an erup- 

 tion !" I shall not say what answer I gave ; but it was sufficient to 

 astound the minstrel. He started back a few paces ; but needless alarm 

 was no part of his trade, and he returned, begging a million of pardons 

 for having obtruded on my leisure, and requesting permission to give me 

 a specmien of his skill on his instrument. He next tried to improvise some 

 of the common-places, <>n love, absence, and the glories of Naples. But 

 his art failed. He was full of but one topic ; and he gave me a long 

 succession of stanzas on the virtues and values of " twenty years." — 



" Within the next twenty years," sang this dismantled son of Phoebus, 

 " all the woild expects to find what it wants. The trader marks it as 

 the end of his trade, when he shall be compelled to cheat no more, and 

 may retire to settle the affairs of his soul in a villa within sight of the 

 bay ; the lawyer expects, by that time, to labour for fees no more, but 

 to be entitled to bribes on the bench ; the man of office is to be reposing 

 in the dehghts of a sinecure ; the soldier is to have a brigade ; and the 

 statesman — that most unsatisfied and unpitied of all the slaves that human 



