r cruppers; that other vase on which
Pallas is standing erect in a car, leaning on her spear; the silver
saucepan,--there were such in those days,--the handle of which is
secured by two birds' heads; the simple pair of scales--they carved
scales then!--where one sees the half bust of a warrior wearing a
splendid helmet; in fine, the humblest articles, utensils of lowest use,
nay, even simple earthenware covered with graceful ornaments, sometimes
exquisitely worked;--were we to go to the museum at Naples and ask what
the ancients used instead of the hideous boxes in which we shut up our
dead, and there behold this beautiful urn which looks as though it were
incrusted with ivory, and which has upon it in bas-relief carved masks
enveloped in complicated vine-tendrils twisted, laden with clusters of
grapes, intermingled with other foliage, tangled all up in rollicking
arabesques, forming rosettes, in the midst of which birds are seen
perching, and leaving but two spaces open where children dear to Bacchus
are plucking grapes or treading them under foot, trilling stringed
lyres, blowing on double flutes or tumbling about and snapping their
fingers--the urn itself in blue glass and the reliefs in white--for the
ancients knew how to carve glass,--ah! undoubtedly, in surveying all
these marvels, we should be forced to concede that the citizen in old
times was at least, as much of an artist as he is to-day. This was
because in those times no barrier was erected between the citizen and
the artist. There were no two opposing camps--on one side the
Philistines, and on the other the people of God. There was no line of
distinction between the needful and the superfluous, between the
positive and the ideal. Art was daily bread, and not holiday pound-cake;
it made its way everywhere; it illuminated, it gladdened, it perfumed
everything. It did not stand either outside of or above ordinary life;
it was the soul and the delight of life; in a word, it penetrated it,
and was penetrated by it,--it _lived_! This is what these modest ruins
teach.[J]

[Footnote F: See note on page 198. (The Footnote J of this
book.--Transcriber.)]

[Footnote G: The learned Minervini has remarked certain differences in
the washes put on the Pompeian walls. He has indicated finer ones with
which, according to him, the ancients painted in fresco their more
studied compositions, landscapes, and figures, while ordinary
decorations were painted _dry_ by inferior p