c and
Corinthian columns scattered about them. At the upper end were the
vacant seats of the Judges, and behind them we descended into a dungeon
where the ashes and cinders had found two prisoners chained on that
memorable November night, and tortured them to death. How they must have
tugged at the pitiless fetters as the fierce fires surged around them!

Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous private mansion which
we could not have entered without a formal invitation in incomprehensible
Latin, in the olden time, when the owners lived there--and we probably
wouldn't have got it. These people built their houses a good deal alike.
The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of
many-colored marbles. At the threshold your eyes fall upon a Latin
sentence of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, with the legend
"Beware of the Dog," and sometimes a picture of a bear or a faun with no
inscription at all. Then you enter a sort of vestibule, where they used
to keep the hat-rack, I suppose; next a room with a large marble basin
in the midst and the pipes of a fountain; on either side are bedrooms;
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 d