Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous private mansion which we could not have entered without a formal invitation in incomprehensible Latin, in the olden time, when the owners lived there—­and we probably wouldn’t have got it.  These people built their houses a good deal alike.  The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of many-colored marbles.  At the threshold your eyes fall upon a Latin sentence of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, with the legend “Beware of the Dog,” and sometimes a picture of a bear or a faun with no inscription at all.  Then you enter a sort of vestibule, where they used to keep the hat-rack, I suppose; next a room with a large marble basin in the midst and the pipes of a fountain; on either side are bedrooms; beyond the fountain is a reception-room, then a little garden, dining-room, and so forth and so on.  The floors were all mosaic, the walls were stuccoed, or frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and here and there were statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and cascades of sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the colonnade of handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the flower-beds fresh and the air cool.  Those Pompeiians were very luxurious in their tastes and habits.  The most exquisite bronzes we have seen in Europe, came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and also the finest cameos and the most delicate engravings on precious stones; their pictures, eighteen or nineteen centuries old, are often much more pleasing than the celebrated rubbish of the old masters of three centuries ago.  They were well up in art.  From the creation of these works of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems hardly to have existed at all—­at least no remnants of it are left—­and it was curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these old time pagans excelled the remote generations of masters that came after them.  The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and the Dying Gladiator, in Rome.  They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be conjectured.  But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.

It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this old silent city of the dead—­lounging through utterly deserted streets where thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and walked and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of traffic and pleasure.  They were not lazy.  They hurried in those days.  We had evidence of that.  There was a temple on one corner, and it was a shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple from one street to the other than to go around—­and behold that pathway had been worn deep into the heavy flagstone floor of the building by generations of time-saving feet!  They would not go around when it was quicker to go through.  We do that way in our cities.