beyond the fountain is a reception-room, then a little garden,

dining-room, and so forth and so on. The floors were all mosaic, the

walls were stuccoed, or frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and

here and there were statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and

cascades of sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the

colonnade of handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the

flower-beds fresh and the air cool. Those Pompeiians were very

luxurious in their tastes and habits. The most exquisite bronzes we

have seen in Europe, came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and

Pompeii, and also the finest cameos and the most delicate engravings on

precious stones; their pictures, eighteen or nineteen centuries old, are

often much more pleasing than the celebrated rubbish of the old masters

of three centuries ago. They were well up in art. From the creation of

these works of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems

hardly to have existed at all--at least no remnants of it are left--and

it was curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these old

time pagans excelled the remote generations of masters that came after

them. The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and

the Dying Gladiator, in Rome. They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from

the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be

conjectured. But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the

blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely

mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.

It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this old silent

city of the dead--lounging through utterly deserted streets where

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The Innocents Abroad