at last great historical or religious
subjects that sometimes covered a whole piece of wall and to which the
socle and the frieze served as a sort of showy and majestic framework.
Thus, the fancy of the decorator could rise even to the height of epic
art.

Those paintings will be eternally studied: they give us precious data,
not only on art, but concerning everything that relates to
antiquity,--its manners and customs, its ceremonies, its costumes, the
homes of those days, the elements and nature as they then appeared.
Pompeii is not a gallery of pictures; it is rather an illustrated
journal of the first century. One there sees odd landscapes; a little
island on the edge of the water; a bank of the Nile where an ass,
stooping to drink, bends toward the open jaws of a crocodile which he
does not see, while his master frantically but vainly endeavors to pull
him back by the tail. These pieces nearly always consist of rocks on the
edge of the water, sometimes interspersed with trees, sometimes covered
with ranges of temples, sometimes stretching away in rugged solitudes,
where some shepherd wanders astray with his flock, or from time to
time, enlivened with a historical scene (Andromeda and Perseus). Then
come little pictures of inanimate nature,--baskets of fruit, vases of
flowers, household utensils, bunches of vegetables, the collection of
office-furniture painted in the house of Lucretius (the inkstand, the
stylus, the paper-knife, the tablets, and a letter folded in the shape
of a napkin with the address, "To Marcus Aurelius, flamen of Mars, and
decurion of Pompeii"). Sometimes these paintings have a smack of humor;
there are two that go together on the same wall. One of them shows a
cock and a hen strolling about full of life, while upon the other the
cock is in durance vile, with his legs tied and looking most doleful
indeed: his hour has come!

I say nothing of the bouquets in which lilies, the iris, and roses
predominate, nor of the festoons, the garlands, nay, the whole thickets
that adorn, the walls of Sallust's garden. Let me here merely point out
the pictures of animals, the hunting scenes, and the combats of wild
beasts, treated with such astonishing vigor and raciness. There is one,
especially, still quite fresh and still in its place, in one of the
houses recently discovered. It represents a wild boar rushing headlong
upon a bear, in the presence of a lion, who looks on at him with the
most superb indif