Rome : pagan and papal / by Mourant Brock.

  • Brock, Mourant, 1802-1883.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rome : pagan and papal / by Mourant Brock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Vatican, keep themselves warm by standing round a great open brazen vessel filled with live charcoal. As I contem- plated them, I thought of Simon Peter, at the palace of the High Priest in Jerusalem, standing with the guard, and “warming himself,” probably, at just the same kind of fire, the “fire of coals ”—i.e., charcoal—of the New Testament. One may also see in Pompeii the shop-signs so common in modern towns. For example, the figure of a goat, or of a cow, to indicate the sale of milk ; and so also the signs of various trades. Among them is a pictorial advertisement of a schoolmaster, found also at Herculaneum. Here you have it, reader. And characteristic of the calling it certainly is, showing that pedagogues two thousand years ago were just as fond of torturing boys with the birch as they used to be in our own country in my boyish days. It made me twist as I looked at it, and thought of the petty tyrant who ground me with oppression in tender childhood. Not that I would be under- stood to imply that boys never require the rod. No doubt they do sometimes, and it would be a good thing if our magistrates could see that occasionally men do also. At Siena, again, in the noble Piccolomini library adjoining the cathedral, there is, in one of the many illuminated choir books, an illustration of the same disagreeable subject. As one walks along the deserted streets of Pompeii, the eye