Two very beautiful pieces of antique painting, now in London, which were found near Rome, seem to corroborate my opinion that the pictures scattered through the Italian provinces were generally inferior to those belonging to Rome itself and the immediate neighbourhood. One of these is the half figure of a boy, with a double flute; broad in colour and effect, and round and fine in form, reminding one of the Venetian frescoes, particularly those of Paul Veronese. The other is a Ganymede, very beautiful in form, and remarkable for the effect of light and shadow. The light is principally on the body of the Ganymede, in the centre, and carried into the blue sky on the left; but a low, light stone altar on the right balances it. Over the altar, the eagle, with outstretched wings, is dark; and the dark is continued behind the lower part of the figure of the boy by a purple mantle. These two pictures have none of the stiff, sculpture-like look of almost all the other antique pictures I have seen. They are real pictures, in which the artist has attended to light and shadow, and to general effect, as well as to colour and form. Whether they were the works of Greeks settled in Rome, or of their Italian scholars, they give me the notion of much more skill in painting, as an art quite distinct from sculpture, than any other antique picture I ever saw[64]. By the existing statues we perceive that the ancient writers did not exaggerate the merit of their sculptors; why therefore should we doubt their judgment as to their painters? But to whatever perfection the art of painting might have arrived in the bright days of Greece, it is certain that, when Pliny wrote, it had sunk down to a very low degree in that country: and there is good reason to believe that under the Empire there were no great Roman painters; but this was not for want of encouragement. In the towns preserved by the ashes of Vesuvius there is scarcely a house where some apartment is not painted, where the precious red walls, varnished with wax[65], are not decorated with dancing figures and arabesques; and certainly not one where the doorways or the kitchens are not adorned or disfigured, as it may be, with portraits of all manner of utensils and articles of food. I confess I have been charmed to observe that glass decanters, pretty like our own, were used for water, wine, and sherbet, at the drinking houses in those ancient fishing towns; that their sirloins were cut in true English fashion, as in the picture in what is called the surgeon’s house, that dog who is gnawing the bones of one could tell; and that hams and legs of mutton, to say nothing of broiled eels, must have looked just like our own when brought to table. But above all was my fancy diverted, when I perceived, by the sign over the school-master’s door, that the same remedies for dulness were prescribed eighteen centuries ago, as are found beneficial now.