22 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2°<i S. IX. Jan. 14. 'GO. 



through knowledge— with the future through 

 faith. It is a form of that belief in the eternity of 

 beinc which lies in the inward recesses of the 

 soul.° It is this which impels men to travel, which 

 leads to the exploration of the vestiges of anti- 

 quity, which makes the graves to give up their 

 dead, whether it be the rude tomb of a Saxon 

 chief, or the city of Pompeii recovered and bared 

 to the glarish eye of day, by the continuous la- 

 bours of the most eminent archaeologists. 



In this respect, in relation also to the early 

 period of Western civilisation in a form whether 

 as regards religion, laws, manners, and customs 

 now utterly passed away, the ruins of Hercula- 

 neum and Pompeii possess an interest superior to 

 all others. The ruins of the East, of Egypt, 

 Greece, and Italy are portions of a whole, the 

 fragments of successive ages of continuous mental 

 development ; but the remains of Pompeii may be 

 considered as the perfect monument of a city which 

 went down into the grave whilst the sound of re- 

 velry was in its streets, and the pulse of life was 

 thick beating in its veins. Here society presents 

 itself as it lived and moved and, had its being. 

 Knowledge, arts, public pursuits, social customs 

 and manners, general depravity and moral aspects, 

 the individual and the general, here alike are 

 shown in the deep shadows of a once bright day. 

 These street scribblings then possess much in- 

 terest. Graffiti, as may be readily supposed, are 

 of great antiquity. They are found among the 

 ruins of Egypt from the days of the Ptolemies to 

 those of Victoria : in the peninsula of Sinai, amid 

 the ruins of Greece and Italy. Aristophanes, 

 Lucian, Plautus, and Propertius allude to them. 

 In the city of Rome the eloquence of walls was 

 very powerful. It aided the Agrarian Laws of 

 Tiberius Gracchus, as it would now the Man- 

 chester platform of John Bright. Sometimes they 

 are quotations from Ovid, but there are none from 

 Horace. This is natural. Ovid presented to the 

 Pompeian the reflex subjectivity of his own 

 thought ; Horace charms by ft severe style ; the 

 first is the poet of sensuous feeling, the latter of 

 cultivated intellect. The oldest Latin MS. per- 

 haps in existence is a scribble which carries us 

 back in imagination from the present to a.d. 18, 



"TI CAESARE TERTIO GEEMANICO CAESAR. ITER. 

 COS." 



Next an advertisement for a game of rackets 

 to be played. Inscriptions which record the 

 badge of slavery by their own grammatical forms. 

 An appeal to the Pilicrepi or ball players to vote 

 for Fermus at the next election of municipal offi- 

 cers. A legal threat ? " Somius threatens Cor- 

 nelius with an action the day after tomorrow.'' 

 These words were probably scrawled by some 

 slave on the stucco while the lawyers of Pompeii 

 were engaged in pleading. 



Then scraps of poetry, doggrel verses, notices of 



a spot visited. A name, with the intimation the 

 owner was a thief. Verses in praise of a mistress. 

 Notice of lost property, and rewards for its re- 

 covery. Philosophical apophthegms. School- 

 boys' scrawls, to aid perhaps the recital of the 

 morning lesson, and first lines in penmanship. 

 Lampoons, caricatures, and indications of the 

 most morbid, disgusting, lascivious ribaldry. 

 Others are of higher pretension, as attempts to 

 parody the pompous style of epistolary dispatches. 

 "Pyrrhus, C. Heio conlegae salutem. Moleste 

 fero quod audivi te mortuam ; itaque Vale." Dr. 

 Wordsworth adds, p. 71., an effusion of raillery 

 somewhat similar is the following : it is a slave's 

 character : " Cosmus nequitiae est magnussimse." 

 The new superlative, " magnussimse," coined for 

 the occasion, may remind you of the story of his 

 eminence Cardinal York, who was irritably tena- 

 cious of his royal dignity, and when asked at din- 

 ner in too familiar a style, as he thought, whether 

 he could taste a particular viand, replied, " Non 

 ne voglio, perche il Re mio padre, non ne ha 

 mangiato mai, e la Regina mia madre maiissimo." 

 To this may be added lists of champions in the 

 arena, enumerating their victories. 



It may be doubtful whether literature and art 

 have lost much by the destruction of Pompeii. 

 Extremes meet; the highest point of wealthy civi- 

 lisation touches upon the extreme of intellectual 

 debasement. We may have lost some great me- 

 morials of art, of an imaginative and graceful form 

 of decoration, the reflection of the happy sensuous- 

 ness of an Italian people living beneath the influence 

 of a joyous sky, and a philosophy which taught in 

 strains of the highest poetry that man should pre- 

 fer the present to the future, the actual to a 

 possible ideal, — omit to think of the morrow, and 

 seize with ecstasy the brimming cup of pleasure 

 which the Day presented to his lips — but nothing 

 which could teach nations how to live, could add 

 an invention to promote social happiness, or a 

 virtue which could stimulate as example, has 

 perished beneath the ashes of this City of the 

 Plain. S. H. 



A DIFFICULT PROBLEM SOLVED DURING 

 SLEEP. 



In his Volksmagazijn voor Burger en Boer (vol. 

 ii. p. 27.), the Rev. J. de Liefde relates a re- 

 markable case of somnambulism : and, though it is 

 the first time I have seen it in print, I can very well 

 remember that my father often told me the same. 

 The author writes : — 



" In 1839 I fell in with a clergyman (he is now dead : 

 but of his truthfulness I never yet entertained a doubt), 

 who communicated to me the following incident from his 

 own life's experience : 



" ' I was,' said he, ' a student at the Mennonite Semi - 

 nary at Amsterdam, and frequented the mathematical 



