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magnificently large and elaborate, the water pipes still there which supplied them all — some of these still flowing.
The ornamentation of the baths was most elaborate and can still be traced; for instance, a long row of square apertures where the bathers left their clothes, and these all separated by beautifully carved little heads.
All the bathrooms have cornices or frescoed ceilings; and the walls are hollow, with apertures to let the heat through.
No modern bath-houses rival them.
In the shops, markets, kitchens, etc., you see the same ingenious contrivances, though the small articles of jewelry are to be sought at the Naples Museum, where it takes time to study them out among the many things from other places.
The main impression felt at Pompeii is that of an essentially luxurious and almost trivial people, with no signs of the earnestness of the greater Greek or even Roman sculpture.
Not that there are not figures of deities and representations of religious rites, but you do not feel that they represent the real life of the people, and perhaps did not anywhere.
The theatre and larger amphitheatre are very well preserved and real and make all our modern, wooden-seated structures seem trivial and transient.
Rome, May 12
... Of the places I saw in that region [Naples] Herculaneum interested me most, and all the more because it is so neglected; nobody else seemed to go to it. ... It was to me far more interesting than Pompeii, first as representing a far higher and more 