Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/400

 368 ROMAN ARCHITECTURE. Part I. of the beauties of nature which one would hardly expect in a Roman. This great arcade is the princij)al feature in the whole design and commands a view well worthy the erection of such a gallery for its complete enjoyment. Pompeii and Herculaneum. Failing to discover any example of domestic architecture in Rome, we return to Pompeii and Herculaneum, where we find numerous and most interesting examples of houses of all classes, except, perhaps, the best ; for there is nothing there to compare Avith the Laurentian villa of Pliny, or with some others of which descriptions have come down to us. Pompeii, moreover, was far more a Grecian than a Roman city, and its buildings ought to be considered rather as illustrative of those of Greece, or at least of Magna Graecia, than of anything found to the northward. Still these cities belonged to the Roman age, and except in taste and in minor arrangements, we have no reason to doubt that the buildings did resemble those of Rome, at least t« a sufiicient extent for illustration. With scarcely an exception, all the houses of Pompeii were of one story only in height. It is true that in some we find staircases leading to the roof, and traces of an upper story, but where this latter is the case the apartments Avould appear to have been places for washing and drying clothes, or for some such domestic purpose rather than for living or even sleeping rooms. All the principal apartments were certainly on the ground floor, and an almost inevitable corollary from this, they all faced inwards, and were lighted from courtyards or atria^ and not from the outside ; for, with a people who had not glass with which to glaze their windows, it was impossible to enjoy privacy or security without at the same time excluding both light and air, otherwise than by lighting their rooms from the interior. Hence it arose that in most instances the outside of the better class of houses was given up to shops and smaller dwellings, which opened on to the street, while the residence, with the exception of the ]:)rincipal entrance, and sometimes one or two private doors that opened outwards, Avas wholly hidden from vicAV by their entourage. Even in. the smallest class of tradesman's houses which opened on the street, one apartment seems ahvays to have been left unroofed to light at least tAvo rooms on each side of it, used as bedrooms ; but as the roofs of all are now gone, it is not ahvays easy to determine which were so treated. It is certain that, in the smallest houses Avhich can have belonged to persons at all above the class of shopkeej^ers, there Avas ahvays a central apartment, unroofed in the centre, into Avhich the others