in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in
an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg
carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his
shepherd's crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.
Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this
rivalry, and you see

"Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,"

as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish
resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant,
which is altogether delicious.

"And I beheld great Here's angry eyes."

Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these
pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes--still, beautiful, unhuman.
You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and
women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and
in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal
orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here
art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which
give a _sense_ (nothing gives the idea) of the _stare_ of these gods,
except that magnificent line of Kingsley's, describing the advance
over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing
Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes

"Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
of the idols."

The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh
and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos
wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the
colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of
these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which
the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming.
The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits
utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves
with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a
linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis,
another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions
too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of
this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most
of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away.
The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes
washed from the pictures,