successor of the Middle Ages, the monastic cloister of religious
meditation. Cannot we imagine to ourselves the goodman of the house
proudly leading his guests after a sumptuous meal in the adjacent
dining-room into the cool corridors of his peristyle, in order to point
out to them his statues and vases of bronze or porphyry, and to expatiate
upon their value or elegance of form? On such a festive occasion these
great shallow basins of pure white marble before us would be heaped high
with fragrant pyramids of red and white roses, roses that were perhaps
plucked all dewy in the famous gardens of Paestum on the other side of
Mons Gaurus. For the flowering shrubs in the tiny pleasaunce itself are
far too precious to be stripped of their blossoms in so lavish a manner,
and perhaps if Vettius be anything of an amateur gardener, he may comment
to his visitors upon the rare plants that fill his diminutive flower-beds.
Careful and reverent hands have restored the little garden as near as
possible to its pristine plan and appearance. There are still standing the
two bronze statues of urchins holding in their chubby arms ducks from
whose bills once gushed the limpid water, making a soothing sound amidst
the alleys of the peristyle; corroded and injured they certainly appear,
yet here they hold their original positions in Vettius' domain long after
temple and tower have fallen to the ground. The marble chairs and tripod
tables likewise remain, and around them still thrive the very plants that
the servants of the house were wont to tend in the days of Titus. For, by
a rare chance, we find depicted on the walls of the excavated house the
actual flowers and herbs that were popular during Vettius' lifetime, and
these have been replanted by modern hands in the garden of the peristyle.
There are clumps of papyrus, the strange mop-headed rush from the banks of
the Nile, introduced into Italy as a botanical novelty after the conquest
of Egypt; there are rose-bushes, of course; and also masses of shining ivy
trained in the ancient Roman manner upon a cage of wicker-work fixed into
the soil. As we watch the verdure-clad sunlit space there descends,
delicately fluttering, one of those splendid pale yellow brimstone
butterflies of the South with flame-coloured blushes on its wings, and
after some moments of graceful hesitation, this new visitor settles upon
the purple head of an iris bloom. With its vivid colouring and its quick
movements the