trance passage. To right and left are various chambers, shut off
by lofty doors or by portieres or both. To these light is admitted
their doors and the gratings over them, from the high window-slits
already mentioned in the outer wall, or sometimes, when there is no
upper storey, from sky-lights. And here let it be observed that the
notion that the Romans of this date used very little glass is
altogether erroneous, as the discoveries at Pompeii and elsewhere
sufficiently prove.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Interior of Roman House. (Looking from
Reception-hall to Peristyle.)]

The walls of the hall are in the better instances either coated with
panels of tinted marble, or parcelled out in bright bands or oblongs
of paint, or decorated with pictures of mythological, architectural,
and other subjects worked in bright colours upon darkened stucco. To
our own taste these colours--red, yellow, bluish-green, and others--as
seen at Pompeii, are often excessively crude and badly harmonised. But
while it is true that the ancients appear to have been actually
somewhat deficient in colour-sense, it must be borne in mind that many
of the Pompeian houses were decorated by journeymen rather than by
artists, and, above all, full allowance must be made for the
comparatively subdued light in which most of the paintings would be
seen. The hall might also contain statuary placed against the walls or
against the supporting pillars, where these existed. At the farther
end from the entrance you will perceive to right and left two large
recesses or bays, generally with pilasters on either side. These
"wings" were utilised for a variety of purposes. One of them might
occasionally serve for a smaller dining-room, or it might hold presses
and cupboards. In noble houses one of them would contain certain
family possessions of which the occupants were especially proud. These
were the effigies of distinguished ancestors, which served as a
family-tree represented in a highly objective form. At our chosen date
there would be a series of portrait busts or else of portrait
medallions, in relief or painted, while in special receptacles,
labelled underneath with name and rank, were kept life-like wax masks
of the line of distinguished persons, which could be brought out and
carried in procession at the funeral of a member of the family. Though
there was no "College of Heralds" in antiquity, it was commonly quite
possible for a wealthy parvenu to get a pedig