oderately good; those discovered in
the temples, such as Isis, Bacchus, Venus, etc., have not come down from
the Parthenon. The decline of taste makes itself apparent in the latest
ornamentation of the tombs and edifices, and the decorative work of the
houses, the marble embellishments; and, above all, those executed in
stucco become overladen and tawdry, heavy and labored, toward the last.
Nevertheless, they reveal, if not a great aesthetic feeling, at least
that yearning for elegance which entered so profoundly into the manners
of the ancients. With us, in fine, art is never anything but a
superfluity--something unfamiliar and foreign that comes in to us from
the outside when we are wealthy. Our paintings and our sculptures do not
make part and parcel of our houses. If we have a Venus of Milo on our
mantel-clock, it is not because we worship beauty, nor that, to our
view, there is the slightest connection between the mother of the Graces
and the hour of the day. Venus finds herself very much out of her
element there; she is in exile, evidently. On the other hand, at Pompeii
she is at home, as Saint Genevieve once was at Paris, as Saint Januarius
still is at Naples. She was the venerated patroness whose protection
they invoked, whose anger they feared. "May the wrath of the angry
Pompeian Venus fall upon him!" was their form of imprecation. All these
well-known stories of gods and demigods who throned it on the walls,
were the fairy tales, the holy legends, the thousand-times-repeated
narratives that delighted the Pompeians. They had no need of explanatory
programmes when they entered their domestic museums. To find something
resembling this state of things, we should have to go into our country
districts where there still reigns a divinity of other days--Glory--and
admiringly observe with what religious devotion coarse lithographs of
the "Old Flag," and of the "Little Corporal," are there retained and
cherished. There, and there only, our modern art has infused itself into
the life and manners of the people. Is it equal to ancient art?

If, from painting and sculpture, we descend to inferior branches,--if,
as we tried to do in the house of Pansa, we despoil the museum so as to
restore their inmates to the homes of Pompeii, and put back in its place
the fine candelabra with the carved panther bearing away the infant
Bacchus at full speed; the precious _scyphus_, in which two centaurs
take a bevy of little Cupids on thei