The proud stars shall fail- Its depths of despair, Is the corpse of the giant TIME! To summon and save His own! Oh joy to Care, and woe to Crime. Woe to the proud ones who defy Him! Woe to the wicked, woe!" A sudden silence from the startled hall of revel succeeded these ominous words; the Christians swept on, and were soon hidden from the sight of the gladiator. Awed, he scarce knew why, by the mystic denunciations of the Christians, Lydon, after a short pause, now rose to pursue his way homeward. Before him, how serenely slept the starlight on that lovely city! how breathlessly its pillared streets reposed in their security!-how softly rippled the dark-green waves beyond! how cloudless spread, aloft and blue, the dreaming Campanian skies! Yet this was the last night for the gay Pompeii! the colony of the hoar Chaldæan! the fabled city of Hercules! the delight of the voluptuous Roman! Age after age had rolled, indestructive, unheeded, over its head; and now the last ray quivered on the dial-plate of its doom! The gladiator heard some light steps behind a group of females were wending homeward from their visit to the amphitheatre. As he turned, his eye was arrested by a strange and sudden ap parition. From the summit of Vesuvius, darkly visible at the distance, there shot a pale, meteoric, livid light-it trembled an instant, and was gone. And at the same mo ment that his eye caught it, the voice of one of the youngest of the women broke out hilariously and shrill : "TRAMP, TRAMP! HOW GAILY THEY GO! Ho, HO! FOR THE MORROW'S MERRY SHOW!" "Mutatus ordo est-sede nil proprià jacet, Sed acta retro cuncta."-Ibid. "Tempore quanquam illo tellus quoque, et æquora ponti, Signa dabant."-VIRGIL: Georgic. lib. i. |