It was in this first century that the great catastrophe, which buried several ancient cities in one of the most cultivated parts of Italy, occurred. It proved fatal, too, to the extraordinary man to whom we owe not only the greatest part of our knowledge of the painters of antiquity, but all that is to be depended upon of the practice of the art. Pompeii with other towns was covered with ashes from Mount Vesuvius; and in them such works of art as were not portable, remained fresh as at the day of their disappearance, to gratify our curiosity: and it was in a visit to Pompeii to observe the phenomena connected with the eruption that Pliny lost his life. Every one must be struck with the great disparity between the bronzes and marbles, and the pictures of Pompeii. Some of the bronze figures and most of the furniture of that metal are exquisite in taste and execution, and many of the marbles are not far behind them. But the pictures are of a very inferior character, generally speaking. Single figures there are indeed of great beauty, and some arabesques elegantly designed; but the groups are for the most part more like sculpture than painting; and the few landscapes are little better than those of the Chinese. To account for this in some measure, I would suggest, that the pictures we have found are merely the decorations of small private houses, and that they must have been executed late in the decline of art, because the great earthquake which had destroyed the temples of Pompeii, but a few years before that eruption of the mountain which buried the town, must have shaken the stucco from the walls, and with it whatever specimens of art of a better time might have then existed[63]. Besides, the inhabitants of Pompeii had most of them time to escape with their most precious moveables. Now, if any of the residents in that small provincial town, which was to Rome as Folkestone may be to London, possessed any Greek pictures, or others of value, they were painted on light wooden pannels (larch or sycamore), and were easily removed, so that, if not saved, they must have been consumed in the fields by the fiery showers, that destroyed more persons without the gates of the town than within them. Hence I cannot think that the pictures of Pompeii furnish a fair criterion by which to judge of the real nature of antique painting, any more than the arabesques that have been found in the Roman baths and the subterranean chambers of the palaces, which we cannot suppose to have been the places where the choicest works of art were placed.