The laying
of our gas- and water-pipes breaks the painting on the walls of
banquet-halls whose last revel was disturbed by the irruption of the
barbarian. Our "main drainage" lies among the temples of gods whose
godlike forms are found mutilated and prostrate among the fallen
columns and tumbled architraves and cornices of their shrines.
But if no awe of the mighty past prevents the speculator and contractor
of our day from marching his army of excavators in an undeviating and
unyielding line impartially athwart the temples, the palaces, the
theatres, the baths of the perished world beneath their feet, yet in
these days of ours the work is done reverently, at least so far as not
only to respect, but to gather up with the most scrupulous care, every
available fragment of the art, and even of the common life, of those
vanished generations. If the day shall come when some future people
shall yet once again build their city on this same eternal site, and
some future social cataclysm shall have overwhelmed the works and
civilization of the present time, those future builders will not find
walls constructed in great part of the fragments of statues and the
richly-carved friezes of yet older builders and artists, as we have
found. The Romans of the present day are, it must be admitted, fully
alive to the inappreciable value of the wondrous heritage they possess
in this kind; and every fragment of it is carefully and jealously
gathered and stored.
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