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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
we at length learn the names of the two unfortunate cities that were 
overwhelmed. But let us place ourselves back in imagination at the 
time of the revival of classic learning in the 16th century, and ask 
what would have been our verdict 1 ? With sincere diffidence, judging 
from such canons of credibility as I have been able to form for my 
own guidance, I believe that I should have said, that beneath these 
varied testimonies there must most probably lie some real kernel of 
truth, but that, although it was possible to underrate the amount of 
the evidence, — Lyell, for instance, omits Plutarch and Statius, — the 
manifest admixture of legendary matter justified one in withholding 
a full credence ; and that serious damage to the cities and consider- 
able loss of life had been magnified into this absolute destruction. 
In other words, without absolutely discrediting the story, I should 
have supposed it to have been woefully exaggerated. 
And yet, on the main point, it was, after all, the contemporary 
annalists who had been reticent and vague ; it was the non-contem- 
porary one who was correct. From the single eye-witness, Pliny the 
younger, the testis ocidatus , whom a Roman proverb declared to be 
worth more than ten who went by hearsay, we get -virtually nothing ; 
from the man who published a narrative four generations afterwards 
(supported no doubt by two contemporaries, a poet and a moralist) we 
obtain names, dates, and all that is most requisite for the production 
of a positive and definite statement. There came a day when the 
words of Dion Cassius were to be proved truthful. First a glimpse 
of some columns, then a shaft sunk in Herculaneum with the object 
of making a well, and at length, in 1755, after a silence (broken 
only by some more general statements of a few historians) which 
had lasted for 1676 years, Pompeii was at length disclosed. The 
streets, the tombs, the baths, the forum, the school for gladiators, 
the temples, the shops, the fountains, all were there, — preserved, as 
has been truly said, by the very catastrophe which seemed to have 
wrought their destruction. Not grand as a whole, yet not wanting 
in the signs of elegance and luxury in domestic architecture, or in the 
marks of culture and civilisation, Pompeii was once more visible. 
The lamps, the buckles, the loaves, the roll about to be made into 
pills, the greaves and cuirasses, the statuettes, the cogged dice, the 
candelabra, the ornaments for female dresses, could all be recognised. 
So far the number of skeletons found has not been large. The reason 
