f the house extended farther)
the opposite banquet-room and the garden, which closed the view with
some gushing fount or marble statue.

The reader will now have a tolerable notion of the Pompeian houses,
which resembled in some respects the Grecian, but mostly the Roman
fashion of domestic architecture. In almost every house there is some
difference in detail from the rest, but the principal outline is the
same in all. In all you find the hall, the tablinum, and the peristyle,
communicating with each other; in all you find the walls richly painted;
and all the evidence of a people fond of the refining elegancies of
life. The purity of the taste of the Pompeians in decoration is,
however, questionable: they were fond of the gaudiest colors, of
fantastic designs; they often painted the lower half of their columns a
bright red, leaving the rest uncolored; and where the garden was small,
its wall was frequently tinted to deceive the eye as to its extent,
imitating trees, birds, temples, etc., in perspective--a meretricious
delusion which the graceful pedantry of Pliny himself adopted, with a
complacent pride in its ingenuity.

But the house of Glaucus was at once one of the smallest, and yet one of
the most adorned and finished of all the private mansions of Pompeii: it
would be a model at this day for the house of 'a single man in
Mayfair'--the envy and despair of the coelibian purchasers of buhl
and marquetry.

You enter by a long and narrow vestibule, on the floor of which is the
image of a dog in mosaic, with the well-known 'Cave canem'--or 'Beware
the dog'. On either side is a chamber of some size; for the interior
part of the house not being large enough to contain the two great
divisions of private and public apartments, these two rooms were set
apart for the reception of visitors who neither by rank nor familiarity
were entitled to admission in the penetralia of the mansion.

Advancing up the vestibule you enter an atrium, that when first
discovered was rich in paintings, which in point of expression would
scarcely disgrace a Rafaele. You may see them now transplanted to the
Neapolitan Museum: they are still the admiration of connoisseurs--they
depict the parting of Achilles and Briseis. Who does not acknowledge
the force, the vigour, the beauty, employed in delineating the forms and
faces of Achilles and the immortal slave!

On one side the atrium, a small staircase admitted to the apartments for
the sl