you would suppose it to be a collection of screens set up
for parlor theatricals. Here is a public square: you will now see in it
only bottom platforms, supports that hold up nothing, shafts of columns
without galleries, pedestals without statues, mute blocks of stone,
space and emptiness. I will lead you into more than one temple. You will
see there only an eminence of masonry, side and end walls, but no front,
no portico. Where is art? Where is the presiding deity of the place? The
ruins of your stable would not be more naked a thousand years hence.
Stones on all sides, tufa, bricks, lava, here and there some slabs of
marble and travertine, then traces of destruction--paintings defaced,
pavements disjointed and full of gaps and cracks--and then marks of
spoliation, for all the precious objects found were carried off to the
museum at Naples, and I can show you now nothing but the places where
once stood the Faun, the statue of Narcissus, the mosaic of Arbelles and
the famous blue vase. Such is the Pompeii that awaits the traveller who
comes thither expecting to find another Paris, or, at least, ruins
arranged in the Parisian style, like the tower of St. Jacques, for
instance.

[Illustration: Clearing out a Narrow Street in Pompeii.]

You will say, perhaps, good reader, that I disenchant you; on the
contrary, I prevent your disenchantment. Do not prepare the way for your
own disappointment by unreasonable expectations or by ill-founded
notions; this is all that I ask of your judgment. Do not come hither to
look for the relics of Roman grandeur. Other impressions await you at
Pompeii. What you are about to see is an entire city, or at all events
the third of an ancient city, remote, detached from every modern town,
and forming in itself something isolated and complete which you will
find nowhere else. Here is no Capitol rebuilt; no Pantheon consecrated
now to the God of Christianity; no Acropolis surmounting a Danish or
Bavarian city; no Maison Carree (as at Nismes) transformed to a gallery
of paintings and forming one of the adornments of a modern Boulevard.
At Pompeii everything is antique and eighteen centuries old; first the
sky, then the landscape, the seashore, and then the work of man,
devastated undoubtedly, but not transformed, by time. The streets are
not repaired; the high sidewalks that border them have not been lowered
for the pedestrians of our time, and we promenade upon the same stones
that were formerl