e next a warm or red
brown, and the lightest, which forms the ground work, an ochery white.

The admirers of this art, so much practised by the Romans as a decoration
of their magnificent buildings, an art which has survived so long as to
have obtained an established manufactory in modern Rome, will ascertain
the pavement in question to be one of the first specimens of antient
mosaic, and will, with gratified attention, here behold form and shade
called up from that unmanageable material, a piece of baked earth.

The commonly received opinion of these pavements having been the floors
of baths, as founded on the circumstance of their being discovered three
or four feet under the surface of the earth, is not conclusive; for the
soil has been raised by accidental accumulation; and had not this been
the case, the depth of three or four feet would not have been sufficient
for a Bath as it could not have allowed room for submersion. Neither
does the vault with a floor and walls of tesselated work, and pipes in
the roof, discovered near Leicester in the reign of James the first, the
memory alone of which is preserved by our indefatigable topographer, Mr.
Nichols, render such an opinion in any respect more certain; but that
some of them were floors of sitting rooms may be justly inferred, from
the flues constructed under them for the purpose of conveying heat.

In examining the specimens of the mosaic art, we are tempted to draw a
far different conclusion from that adopted by the truly learned author of
the _Munimenta Antiqua_, who strongly adduces the number of _fragile_ (as
he terms them) tesselated floors found in Britain, as a proof of the
slightness of the superstructures erected by the Romans. Now, surely it
is not to be expected that a people whose architecture in their own
country was so strikingly characterized by massiveness & splendor,
should, in this island, which though a distant was a durable conquest,
and improved by all their arts and industry, have departed from their
usual principles. And farther, the taste and costly magnificence
discoverable in these curious remains must lead to the conclusion that
they could not have committed them to slight or ordinary buildings, for
they were decorations which the experience of more than fourteen hundred
years has scarcely surpassed. Even the looms of modern Brussels, in
elegance and beauty of pattern, cannot fairly outvie the Mosaic Carpets
of the antient Romans.