figs, chestnuts, lentils, and near them scales and bakers’ and pastry-cooks’ moulds.  Could the Pantheon, then, have been a tavern, a free inn (hospitium) where strangers were received under the protection of the gods?  In that case the supposed butcher-shop must have been a sort of office, and the triclinium a dormitory.  However that may be, the table and the altar, the kitchen and religion, elbow each other in this strange palace.  Our austerity revolts and our frivolity is amused at the circumstance; but Catholics of the south are not at all surprised at it.  Their mode of worship has retained something of the antique gaiety.  For the common people of Naples, Christmas is a festival of eels, Easter a revel of casatelli; they eat zeppole to honor Saint Joseph; and the greatest proof of affliction that can be given to the dying Saviour is not to eat meat.  Beneath the sky of Italy dogmas may change, but the religion will always be the same—­sensual and vivid, impassioned and prone to excess, essentially and eternally Pagan, above all adoring woman, Venus or Mary, and the bambino, that mystic Cupid whom the poets called the first love.  Catholicism and Paganism, theories and mysteries; if there be two religions, they are that of the south and that of the north.

You have just explored the whole eastern part of the Forum.  Pass now in front of the temple of Jupiter and reach the western part.  In descending from north to south, the first monument that strikes your attention is a rather long portico, turned on the east toward the Forum.  Different observers have fancied that they discovered in it a poecile, a museum, a divan, a club, a granary for corn; and all these opinions are equally good.

Behind the poecile open small chambers, of which some are vaulted.  Skeletons were found in them, and the inference was that they were prisons.  Lower down extends along the Forum the lateral wall of the temple of Venus.  In this wall is hollowed a small square niche in which there rose, at about a yard in height from the soil, a sort of table of tufa, indented with regular cavities, which are ranged in the order of their capacity; these were the public measures.  An inscription gives us the names of the duumvirs who had gauged them by order of the decurions.  As M. Breton has well remarked, they were the standards of measurement.  Of these five cavities, the two smallest were destined for liquids, and we still see the holes through which those liquids flowed off when they had been measured.  The table of tufa has been taken to the museum, and in its place has been substituted a rough imitation, which gives a sufficient idea of this curious monument.