shall say nothing either, of the fountains, or of the columns, alas!
formed of shell-work and mosaic.

Faults like these shock the eye of purists; but let us constantly bear
in mind that we are in a small city, the finest residence in which
belonged to a wine-merchant. We could not with fairness expect to find
there the Parthenon, or even the Pantheon of Rome. The Pompeian
architects worked for simple burghers whose moderate wish was to own
pretty houses, not too large nor too dear, but of rich external
appearance and a gayety of look that gratified the eye. These good
tradesmen were served to their hearts' content by skilful persons who
turned everything to good account, cutting rooms by scores within a
space that would not be sufficient for one large saloon in our palaces,
profiting by all the accidents of the soil to raise their structures by
stories into amphitheatres, devising one ingenious subterfuge after
another to mask the defects of alignment, and, in a word, with feeble
resources and narrow means, realizing what the ancients always
dreamed--art combined with every-day life.

For proof of this I point to their paintings covering those handsome
stucco walls, which were so carefully prepared, so frequently overlaid
with the finest mortar, so ingeniously dashed with shining powder, and,
then, so often smoothed, repolished and repacked with wooden rollers
that they, at last, looked like and passed for marble. Whether painted
in fresco or _dry_, in encaustic or by other processes, matters
little--that belongs to technical authorities to decide.[G]

However that may be, these mural decorations were nevertheless a feast
for the eyes, and are so still. They divided the walls into five or six
panels, developing themselves between a socle and a frieze; the socle
being deeper, the frieze clearer in tint, the interspace of a more vivid
red and yellow, for instance, while the frieze was white and the socle
black. In plain houses these single panels were divided by simple lines;
then gradually, as the house selected became more opulent, these lines
were replaced by ornamental frames, garlands, pilasters, and, ere long,
fantastic pavilions, in which the fancy of the decorative artist
disported at will. However, the socles became covered with foliage, the
friezes with arabesques, and the panels with paintings, the latter
quite simple at first, such as a flower, a fruit, a landscape; pretty
soon a figure, then a group, then