I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader
please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon
the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs,
nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary
and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain;
of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of
ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and,
after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow
of that dreamer's work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely
reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty
centimes a copy--I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot
heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of
_Katzenjaemmer_ (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it
when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts
and sciences but one long _Katzenjaemmer_!

Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos,
but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I
used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration
of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and
did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and
ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work
much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern--threw on expanses
of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and
penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the
one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the
rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the
community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from
cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen
from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the
poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which
people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes
not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus
and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,--not to
mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful
monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of
the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of
the Judgment of Paris,