rhymes the modern bard.

What a mass of curious and costly things!  What is the use of rummaging in books!  With the museums of Naples before us, we can reconstruct all the triclinia of Pompeii at a glance.

There, then, are the guests, gay, serene, reclining or leaning on their elbows on the three couches.  The table is before them, but only to be looked at, for slaves are continually moving to and fro, from one to the other, serving every guest with a portion of each dish on a slice of bread.  Pansa daintily carries the delicate morsel offered him to his mouth with his fingers, and flings the bread under the table, where a slave, in crouching attitude, gathers up all the debris of the repast.  No forks are used, for the ancients were unacquainted with them.  At the most, they knew the use of the spoon or cochlea, which they employed in eating eggs.  After each dish they dipped their fingers in a basin presented to them, and then wiped them upon a napkin that they carried with them as we take our handkerchiefs with us.  The wealthiest people had some that were very costly and which they threw into the fire when they had been soiled; the fire cleansed without burning them.  Refined people wiped their fingers on the hair of the cupbearers,—­another Oriental usage.  Recollect Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

At length, the repast being concluded, the guests took off their wreaths, which they stripped of their leaves into a goblet that was passed around the circle for every one to taste, and this ceremony concluded the libations.

I have endeavored to describe the supper of a rich Pompeian and exhibit his dwelling as it would appear reconstructed and re-occupied.  Reduce its dimensions and simplify it as much as possible by suppressing the peristyle, the columns, the paintings, the tablinum, the exedra, and all the rooms devoted to pleasure or vanity, and you will have the house of a poor man.  On the contrary, if you develop it, by enriching it beyond measure, you may build in your fancy one of those superb Roman palaces, the extravagant luxuriousness of which augmented, from day to day, under the emperors.  Lucius Crassus, who was the first to introduce columns of foreign marble, in his dwelling, erected only six of them but twelve feet high.  At a later period, Marcus Scaurus surrounded his atrium with a colonnade of black marble rising thirty-eight feet above the soil.  Mamurra did not stop at so fair a limit.  That distinguished Roman knight covered his whole house with marble.  The residence of Lepidus was the handsomest in Rome seventy-eight years before Christ.  Thirty-five years later, it was but the hundredth.  In spite of some attempts at reaction by Augustus, this passion for splendor reached a frantic pitch.  A freedman in the reign of Claudius decorated his triclinium with thirty-two columns of onyx.  I say nothing of the slaves that were counted by thousands in the old palaces, and by hundreds in the triclinium and kitchen alone.