t, by enriching it beyond
measure, you may build in your fancy one of those superb Roman palaces,
the extravagant luxuriousness of which augmented, from day to day, under
the emperors. Lucius Crassus, who was the first to introduce columns of
foreign marble, in his dwelling, erected only six of them but twelve
feet high. At a later period, Marcus Scaurus surrounded his atrium with
a colonnade of black marble rising thirty-eight feet above the soil.
Mamurra did not stop at so fair a limit. That distinguished Roman knight
covered his whole house with marble. The residence of Lepidus was the
handsomest in Rome seventy-eight years before Christ. Thirty-five years
later, it was but the hundredth. In spite of some attempts at reaction
by Augustus, this passion for splendor reached a frantic pitch. A
freedman in the reign of Claudius decorated his triclinium with
thirty-two columns of onyx. I say nothing of the slaves that were
counted by thousands in the old palaces, and by hundreds in the
triclinium and kitchen alone.

"O ye beneficent gods! how many men employed to serve a single stomach!"
exclaimed Seneca, who passed in his day for a master of rhetoric. In our
time, he would be deemed a socialist.

[Footnote D: So strong was this feeling, that the very name
_inquilinus_, or lodger, was an insult. Cicero not having been born at
Rome, Catiline called him offensively _civis inquilinus_--a lodger
citizen. (_Sallust_.)]

[Footnote E: Let not fingers that are too thick, and ill-pared nails,
make gestures too conspicuous.]

[Illustration: Peristyle of the House of the Quaestor at Pompeii.]

VII.

ART IN POMPEII.

THE HOMES OF THE WEALTHY.--THE TRIANGULAR FORUM AND THE
TEMPLES.--POMPEIAN ARCHITECTURE: ITS MERITS AND ITS DEFECTS.--THE
ARTISTS OF THE LITTLE CITY.--THE PAINTINGS HERE.--LANDSCAPES,
FIGURES, ROPE-DANCERS, DANCING-GIRLS, CENTAURS, GODS, HEROES, THE
ILIAD ILLUSTRATED.--MOSAICS.--STATUES AND
STATUETTES.--JEWELRY.--CARVED GLASS.--ART AND LIFE.

The house of Pansa was large, but not much ornamented. There are others
which are shown in preference to the visitor. Let us mention them
concisely in the catalogue and inventory style:

The house of the Faun.--Fine mosaics; a masterpiece in bronze; the
Dancing Faun, of which we shall speak farther on. Besides the atrium and
the peristyle, a third court, the xysta, surrounded with forty-four
columns, duplicated on the upper story. Nu