Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos, but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also.  I used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does at this day.  But the old workman did his work much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern—­threw on expanses of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one than the other) with a deft hand.  Of course, the houses of the rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands.  The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest.  To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs,—­not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict.  One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd’s crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence.  Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see

  “Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,”

as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious.

  “And I beheld great Here’s angry eyes.”

Awful eyes!  How did the painter make them?  The wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes—­still, beautiful, unhuman.  You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly.  I know of no words in literature which give a sense (nothing gives the idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley’s, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids.  They floated slowly up, and their eyes

  “Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house
  of the idols.”