Those paintings will be eternally studied:  they give us precious data, not only on art, but concerning everything that relates to antiquity,—­its manners and customs, its ceremonies, its costumes, the homes of those days, the elements and nature as they then appeared.  Pompeii is not a gallery of pictures; it is rather an illustrated journal of the first century.  One there sees odd landscapes; a little island on the edge of the water; a bank of the Nile where an ass, stooping to drink, bends toward the open jaws of a crocodile which he does not see, while his master frantically but vainly endeavors to pull him back by the tail.  These pieces nearly always consist of rocks on the edge of the water, sometimes interspersed with trees, sometimes covered with ranges of temples, sometimes stretching away in rugged solitudes, where some shepherd wanders astray with his flock, or from time to time, enlivened with a historical scene (Andromeda and Perseus).  Then come little pictures of inanimate nature,—­baskets of fruit, vases of flowers, household utensils, bunches of vegetables, the collection of office-furniture painted in the house of Lucretius (the inkstand, the stylus, the paper-knife, the tablets, and a letter folded in the shape of a napkin with the address, “To Marcus Aurelius, flamen of Mars, and decurion of Pompeii").  Sometimes these paintings have a smack of humor; there are two that go together on the same wall.  One of them shows a cock and a hen strolling about full of life, while upon the other the cock is in durance vile, with his legs tied and looking most doleful indeed:  his hour has come!

I say nothing of the bouquets in which lilies, the iris, and roses predominate, nor of the festoons, the garlands, nay, the whole thickets that adorn, the walls of Sallust’s garden.  Let me here merely point out the pictures of animals, the hunting scenes, and the combats of wild beasts, treated with such astonishing vigor and raciness.  There is one, especially, still quite fresh and still in its place, in one of the houses recently discovered.  It represents a wild boar rushing headlong upon a bear, in the presence of a lion, who looks on at him with the most superb indifference.  It is divined, as the Neapolitans say; that is, the painter has intuitively conceived the feelings of the two animals; the one blind with reckless fury, the other supremely confident in his own agility and superior strength.

And now I come to the human form.  Here we have endless variety; and all kinds, from the caricature to the epic effort, are attempted and exhausted,—­the wagon laden with an enormous goat-skin full of wine, which slaves are busily putting into amphorae; a child making an ape dance; a painter copying a Hermes of Bacchus; a pensive damsel probably about to dispatch a secret message by the buxom servant-maid waiting there for it; a vendor of Cupids opening his cage full of little winged gods, who, as they escape, tease a sad and pensive woman standing near, in a thousand