quacious hands, this voluble silence,
this unspoken explanation," as was once choicely said, were serviceable
in advancing the great work of Roman unity. "The substitution of ballet
pantomimes for comedy and tragedy resulted in causing the old
masterpieces to be neglected, thereby enfeebling the practice of the
national idioms and seconding the propagation, if not of the language,
at least of the customs and ideas of the Romans." (Charles Magnin.)

If the mimes do not suffice, call into the Odeon the rope-dancers, the
acrobats, the jugglers, the ventriloquists,--for all these lower orders
of public performers existed among the ancients and swarmed in the
Pompeian pictures,--or the flute-players enlivening the waits with their
melody and accompanying the voice of the actors at moments of dramatic
climax. "How can he feel afraid," asked Cicero, in this connection,
"since he recites such fine verses while he accompanies himself on the
flute?" What would the great orator have said had he been present at our
melodramas?

We may then imagine what kind of play we please on the little Pompeian
stage. For my part, I prefer the Atellan farces. They were the
buffooneries of the locality, the coarse pleasantry of native growth,
the hilarity of the vineyard and the grain-field, exuberant fancy,
grotesque in solemn earnest; in a word, ideal sport and frolic without
the least regard to reality--in fine, Punchinello's comedy. We prefer
Moliere; but how many things there are in Moliere which come in a direct
line from Maccus!

It is time to leave the theatre. I have said that the Odeon opened into
the gladiators' barracks. These barracks form a spacious court--a sort
of cloister--surrounded by seventy-four pillars, unfortunately spoiled
by the Pompeians of the restoration period. They topped them with new
capitals of stucco notoriously ill adapted to them. This gallery was
surrounded with curious dwellings, among which was a prison where three
skeletons were found, with their legs fastened in irons of ingeniously
cruel device. The instrument in question may be seen at the museum. It
looks like a prostrate ladder, in which the limbs of the prisoners were
secured tightly between short and narrow rungs--four bars of iron. These
poor wretches had to remain in a sitting or reclining posture, and
perished thus, without the power to rise or turn over, on the day when
Vesuvius swallowed up the city.

It was for a long time thought that thes