On a former visit to Pompeii I thought it a grand place, but after all,
when the traveller has seen the best, it is ordinary and commonplace. It
was a town of only about 30,000 people and almost all of them escaped, so
no particular distinction belongs to it in any respect.
We continued on to Naples, and on the following morning took a local
steamer for Sorrento. We had a look at Vesuvius, which was quiet and
somewhat depressed--as it had lost six hundred feet of its cone at the
last eruption.