the tablinum, was generally another eating-room, on either side of which
were bedrooms, and, perhaps, a picture-saloon, or pinacotheca. These
apartments communicated again with a square or oblong space, usually
adorned on three sides with a colonnade like the peristyle, and very
much resembling the peristyle, only usually longer. This was the proper
viridarium, or garden, being commonly adorned with a fountain, or
statues, and a profusion of gay flowers: at its extreme end was the
gardener's house; on either side, beneath the colonnade, were sometimes,
if the size of the family required it, additional rooms.

At Pompeii, a second or third story was rarely of importance, being
built only above a small part of the house, and containing rooms for the
slaves; differing in this respect from the more magnificent edifices of
Rome, which generally contained the principal eating-room (or
caenaculum) on the second floor. The apartments themselves were
ordinarily of small size; for in those delightful climes they received
any extraordinary number of visitors in the peristyle (or portico), the
hall, or the garden; and even their banquet-rooms, however elaborately
adorned and carefully selected in point of aspect, were of diminutive
proportions; for the intellectual ancients, being fond of society, not
of crowds, rarely feasted more than nine at a time, so that large
dinner-rooms were not so necessary with them as with us. But the suite
of rooms seen at once from the entrance, must have had a very imposing
effect: you beheld at once the hall richly paved and painted--the
tablinum--the graceful peristyle, and (if the house extended farther)
the opposite banquet-room and the garden, which closed the view with
some gushing fount or marble statue.

The reader will now have a tolerable notion of the Pompeian houses,
which resembled in some respects the Grecian, but mostly the Roman