has its counterpart in a couplet which has been preserved:
“‘Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruinas,
Qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.’
(Truly ’tis wonderful, wall, that you have not fallen in ruin;
You that have to support so many nauseous scribblings.)
“Taken as a whole, the graffiti are less fertile for our knowledge of Pompeiian life than might have been expected. The people with whom we should most eagerly desire to come into direct contact, the cultivated men and women of the ancient city, were not accustomed to scratch their names upon stucco or to confide their reflections and experiences to the surface of a wall. Some of the graffiti, to judge from the height at which we find them above the floor, were undoubtedly made by the hands of boys and girls; for the rest, we may assume that the writers were as little representative of the best elements of society as are the tourists who scratch their names upon ancient monuments to-day. Nevertheless, we gain from these scribblings a lively idea of individual tastes, passions, and experiences.”
Here and there in the collection we find imitations of the jests of Hierocles, and sometimes we are amused by inconsistencies and contradictions which remind us of the modern Hibernicism. Of this character is a Greek line scratched upon a wall on the Palatine hill in Rome: “Many persons have here written many things; I alone refrain from writing.”
Superstition
As to the amusing superstitions we so often witness in people of intelligence and impressible nature, the question, even for those who indulge in such fancies, is not whether they are reasonable. Lord Byron would not commence an undertaking of any kind on Friday. But even Byron, with his remarkable sensitiveness to impressions, and his habit of brooding over the mysteries of life, would not venture to assert that such conduct is reasonable. The “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” says, “Jeremy Bentham’s logic, by which he proved he couldn’t possibly see a ghost, is all very well—in the daytime. All the reason in the world will never get impressions of childhood out of a man’s head.” Elsewhere, Dr. Holmes says, “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as a famous French woman did about ghosts, ‘Je n’y crois pas; mais je les crains,’—‘I don’t believe in them; but I am afraid of them, nevertheless.’”