26 DECEMBER 1829, Page 11

NEAPOLITAN HONESTY.

A DISCOVERY of a house has been made in the ruins of Herculaneum, on the peculiarities of which, the patriots of Southern Italy dwell with justifiable complacency. Not a single theft had been committed in it for the last eighteen hundred years ! The doors, when uncovered by the excavators, were found closed precisely as when the lava of Vesuvius buried the city! King FERDINAND and the whole of his people are in raptures at this infallible proof of Italian integrity. The contents of the house render the fact yet more extraordinary—it was full of dates, chesnuts, garlic, oil, and heaven knows what other dain- ties. The family, when surprised by the mountain coming down above their heads, are supposed by the narrator to have been occupied in getting in their winter provisions. We have our doubts of his cor- rectness; we think, in that case, the door would have been open. Perhaps the ancients took in their provisions by the window. By the by, the state of the windows is not reported—Were they fast, as well as the door? The people of the house .appear to have been rich, and lovers of the arts. Of their wealth there is no doubt—witness the chesnuts and the garlic—of their connoisseurship several pictures of Polyphemus, Hercules, Mercury, and Medusa, bear testimony. At Pompeii also, great discoveries have taken place. An ancient house as been discovered, "near that of Castor and Pollux,"—who, every- body knows, were citizens and freemen of the borough. There were no beans and barred doors, however,—nothing to indicate the march of morals among the subjects ,of his Majesty of the Two Sicilies ; and therefore this discovery is not worth mentioning compared with the other