tinkling tambourines. The visitor to the ruins of Pompeii may still see
in her temple the statue of Isis, through whose open lips the gaping
worshippers heard the murmured answers they came to seek. No doubt they
believed as firmly that the image spoke, as our forefathers believed
that their miraculous Madonnas nodded and winked. But time has exposed
the cheat. By the ruined shrine the worshipper may now see the secret
steps by which the priest got to the back of the statue, and the pipe
entering the back of its head through which he whispered the answers of
the oracle.

[Footnote 16: JUV. _Sat_. ii. 149. Cf. Sen. _Ep_. xxiv. "Nemo tam puer
est at Cerberum timeat, et tenebras," &c.]

[Footnote 17: Fragm. xxxiv.]

[Footnote 18: Lactantius, _Divin. Inst_. i. 4.]

III. It was an age of boundless luxury,--an age in which women
recklessly vied with one another in the race of splendour and
extravagance, and in which men plunged headlong, without a single
scruple of conscience, and with every possible resource at their
command, into the pursuit of pleasure. There was no form of luxury,
there was no refinement of vice invented by any foreign nation, which
had not been eagerly adopted by the Roman patricians. "The softness of
Sybaris, the manners of Rhodes and Antioch, and of perfumed, drunken,
flower-crowned Miletus," were all to be found at Rome. There was no
more of the ancient Roman severity and dignity and self-respect. The
descendants of Aemilius and Gracchus--even generals and consuls and
praetors--mixed familiarly with the lowest _canaille_ of Rome in their
vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless vice. They fought as