II.

Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in fiction.  And yet I cannot help it.  An exuberant carelessness of phrase in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much more than it was possible to find there.  In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had no roofs—­in fact, the rafters which sustained the tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in?  But otherwise my Pompeii was a very complete affair:  the walls all rose to their full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived in it very comfortably.  The real Pompeii is different.  It is seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I thought.

But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction, and delight.  It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world.  Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town’s luxurious life and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of Pliny.  These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a valet de place of the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the empire of Titus.  Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked their street-doors.  The counters of these shops run across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top, through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of ashes; those stately amphorae behind are full of wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.

“This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?”

“It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters.  Would you like his autograph?  I know one of his slaves who would sell it.”