Picture to yourself the most costly materials, marbles, breccia, granites, ebony and cedar woods, porphyry, basalt, agate, onyx, lapis-lazuli, bronze, silver, ivory, and gold; conceive the most imposing Egyptian, the most beautiful Grecian architecture, imagine the Parthenon and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, the Pavilion of Rameses, and the ruins of Apollinopolis Magna; recreate the royal palaces of Alexandria, which, with their dependencies, their gardens, their terraces, rising one above another, made up a third of the city: reconstruct the massive enclosures—those double pylons into which opened avenues bordered with sphinxes; those obelisks, those magnificent propylæa, those saloons three hundred feet long and a hundred and fifty wide, supported by vast columns, in which rise double rows of pillars ten meters in circumference and twenty meters in height, bursting into lotus blossoms at their summits; those sanctuaries with their screens enameled in gold and tortoiseshell, and studded with gems; those long picture galleries adorned with the paintings of Zeuxis, Apelles, and Protogenes; those magnificent thermæ with their calidaria, their basins of hot and cold water, their retiring-rooms with walls of red porphyry, their porticos adorned with statues; those gymnasia, theaters, hippodromes, those stages covered with saffron powder, those triclinia where the couches of embossed silver rested on Babylonian carpets; those atria with their uncovered roofs, sustained by Corinthian columns with capitals of golden bronze, by day shaded by purple awnings, the silk of which was worth its weight in gold, and at night open to the starry sky. See, at all seasons, blooming in the gardens roses and violets, and scatter the pavements of onyx and mosaics four times a day with fresh flowers; people this scenery with crowds of slaves, pipers, players of the harp and psaltery, dancers, actors, Atellans [of the drama, as at Atellan, of lascivious character, Atellanæ], acrobats, mimes, gymnasts, ballet-dancers, and serpent-charmers. Load these tables with oysters from Tarentum, lampreys dressed with garum, bonitos cooked in fig-leaves, pink ousels, quails, pheasants, swans, geese livers, stews made of the brains of birds, hares cooked rare and dusted with coriander seeds, truffles as large as the fist which were assumed to fall from the sky like aërolites, cakes of honey and wheat flour, and the most delicious fruits of the Mediterranean basin. In the kitchens, roasting before the fires on immense hearths, for the entertainment of fifteen guests, twelve wild boars, spitted successively at intervals of three minutes, so that, according to the duration of the feast, one of these animals might be exactly cooked at the very moment it was required to be served. Cool in snow the old Cæcuban wine, the Falernian ripened for twenty years, the wines of Phlemtes, Chios, Issa, the imperial wine of Lesbos, the ripe wine of Rhodes, the sweet