decade or so ago, no proper opportunity had so far been afforded to the amateur of our own times of judging for himself the interior of a Roman dwelling in full working order, and with all its furniture, paintings, and utensils complete. Up to this, almost every object of value had been removed at once for safety, every fresco even of importance had been cut bodily out of its setting and placed in one of those immense halls on the ground floor of the Museum in Naples. How well do we remember those gaunt chilly chambers, filled from pavement to ceiling with painted fragments of all sizes, a medley of domestic subjects and of classical myths! Torn from the walls they were specially executed to adorn, divorced from their proper scheme of surrounding ornament, these wan dejected ghosts stare at us like faces out of a mist. The uninitiated cannot find pleasure in them, for they have no pretention to be called works of art; on the contrary they form an inherent part of a conventional system of house decoration. The classical student can of course find many points of interest in the incidents portrayed, but all charm of local environment is absent;—it is, in short, impossible to judge of Roman decoration from this collection of crumbling, fading pieces of painted stucco. It would be as easy to imagine the effect of a rose-bush in full bloom from the sight of a few withered rose-buds, pressed until every vestige of colour had left their petals, as to understand the significance of antique domestic art from the contents of the Museo Nazionale.