Rome, the vandalisms of the
ignorant, or the kilns and melting-pots of the Middle Ages. The
quality is still more a source of delight than the quantity. This last
sentence, of course, contains a truism, since art is no delight
without high quality. If we had only preserved to us such masterpieces
as the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, the Laocoon, the Dancing
Faun, the so-called Narcissus, and the Resting Mercury, we should
realise something of the exquisite skill in plastic art which had been
attained in antiquity and has never been attained since. But we might
perhaps imagine that these were altogether exceptional pieces and the
choicest gems possessed by the world of the time. Yet the preservation
of these is but an accident, and there is no reason to believe them to
be more than survivals out of many equally excellent. On the contrary,
our ancient authorities--such as the elder Pliny--prove that there was
a multitude of similar creations contained in public buildings alone.
Pompeii, it has already been said more than once, was a provincial
town in no way distinguished for the high culture of its inhabitants;
yet there is scarcely a house of any consideration which has not
afforded some example of fine art in one form or another. We know that
several of the Roman temples--such as those of Concord in the Forum
and of Apollo on the Palatine--were veritable galleries of
masterpieces; and that the rich Romans adorned both their town houses
and country villas with dozens of statues, colossal, life-size, or
miniature, by distinguished masters. But still more striking is the
fact that the comparatively small homes of Pompeii often possessed a
work for which no price would now be too large, and of which we are
content even to obtain a tolerably good copy. At Herculaneum there
evidently lived persons of greater literary and artistic I refinement
than at Pompeii, and the discoveries from that only very partially
excavated town make an incalculably rich show of their own. What then
would be the case with Naples, Baiae, the resorts all along the coast
as far as the Tiber, the luxurious villas on the Alban Hills, and the
great metropolis itself?

Yet the fact of this universal recognition of art is scarcely made so
impressive by these collected specimens of perfect taste and perfect
execution, as it is incidentally by observing the delicate and
graceful finish of some moulding on a chance fragment from a building,
such as the