mountains that close its perspective, the cultivated checker-work of the country side, green tufts of the woodlands, and then the gently curving coast-line where Stabiae wound in and out, with the picturesque heights of Sorrento, the deep blue of the sea, the transparent azure of the heavens, the infinite limpidity of the distant horizon, the brilliant clearness and the antique color.  Those who have not beheld this scenery, can only half comprehend its monuments, which would ever be out of place beneath another sky.

It was in this bright sunlight that the Pompeian Acropolis, the triangular Forum, stood.  Eight Ionic columns adorned its entrance and sustained a portico of the purest elegance, from which ran two long slender colonnades widening apart from each other and forming an acute angle.  They are still surmounted with their architrave, which they lightly supported.  The terrace, looking out upon the country and the sea, formed the third side of the triangle, in the middle of which rose some altars,—­the ustrinum, in which the dead were burned, a small round temple covering a sacred well, and, finally, a Greek temple rising above all the rest from the height of its foundation and marking its columns unobstructedly against the sky.  This platform, resting upon solid supports and covered with monuments in a fine style of art, was the best written page and the most substantially correct one in Pompeii.  Unfortunately, here, as everywhere else, stucco had been plastered over the stone-work.  The columns were painted.  Nowhere could a front of pure marble—­the white on the blue—­be seen defined against the sky.

The remaining temples furnish us few data on architecture.  You know those of the Forum.  The temple of Fortune, now greatly dilapidated, must have resembled that of Jupiter.  Erected by Marcus Tullius, a reputed relative of Cicero, it yields us nothing but very mediocre statues and inscriptions full of errors, proving that the priesthood of the place, by no means Ciceronian in their acquirements, did not thoroughly know even their own language.  The temple of Esculapius, besides its altar, has retained a very odd capital, Corinthian if you will, but on which cabbage leaves, instead of the acanthus, are seen enveloping a head of Neptune.  The temple of Isis, still standing, is more curious than handsome.  It shows[F] that the Egyptian goddess was venerated at Pompeii, but it tells us nothing about antique art.  It is entered at the side, by a sort of corridor leading into the sacred inclosure.  The temple is on the right; the columns inclose it; a vaulted niche is hollowed out beneath the altar, where it served as a hiding-place for the priests,—­at least so say the romance-writers.  Unfortunately for this idea, the doorway of the recess stood forth and still stands forth to the gaze, rendering the alleged trickery impossible.