stories of gods and demigods who throned it on the walls, were the fairy tales, the holy legends, the thousand-times-repeated narratives that delighted the Pompeians.  They had no need of explanatory programmes when they entered their domestic museums.  To find something resembling this state of things, we should have to go into our country districts where there still reigns a divinity of other days—­Glory—­and admiringly observe with what religious devotion coarse lithographs of the “Old Flag,” and of the “Little Corporal,” are there retained and cherished.  There, and there only, our modern art has infused itself into the life and manners of the people.  Is it equal to ancient art?

If, from painting and sculpture, we descend to inferior branches,—­if, as we tried to do in the house of Pansa, we despoil the museum so as to restore their inmates to the homes of Pompeii, and put back in its place the fine candelabra with the carved panther bearing away the infant Bacchus at full speed; the precious scyphus, in which two centaurs take a bevy of little Cupids on their cruppers; that other vase on which Pallas is standing erect in a car, leaning on her spear; the silver saucepan,—­there were such in those days,—­the handle of which is secured by two birds’ heads; the simple pair of scales—­they carved scales then!—­where one sees the half bust of a warrior wearing a splendid helmet; in fine, the humblest articles, utensils of lowest use, nay, even simple earthenware covered with graceful ornaments, sometimes exquisitely worked;—­were we to go to the museum at Naples and ask what the ancients used instead of the hideous boxes in which we shut up our dead, and there behold this beautiful urn which looks as though it were incrusted with ivory, and which has upon it in bas-relief carved masks enveloped in complicated vine-tendrils twisted, laden with clusters of grapes, intermingled with other foliage, tangled all up in rollicking arabesques, forming rosettes, in the midst of which birds are seen perching, and leaving but two spaces open where children dear to Bacchus are plucking grapes or treading them under foot, trilling stringed lyres, blowing on double flutes or tumbling about and snapping their fingers—­the urn itself in blue glass and the reliefs in white—­for the ancients knew how to carve glass,—­ah! undoubtedly, in surveying all these marvels, we should be forced to concede that the citizen in old times was at least, as much of an artist as he is to-day.  This was because in those times no barrier was erected between the citizen and the artist.  There were no two opposing camps—­on one side the Philistines, and on the other the people of God.  There was no line of distinction between the needful and the superfluous, between the positive and the ideal.  Art was daily bread, and not holiday pound-cake; it made its way everywhere; it illuminated, it gladdened, it perfumed everything.  It did not stand either outside of or above ordinary life; it was the soul and the delight of life; in a word, it penetrated it, and was penetrated by it,—­it lived!  This is what these modest ruins teach.[J]