They Imported Wholesale By His Predecessor Augustus, Who Was Anxious To Be Known As A Scorner Of Luxury (A Favourite

Pose with monarchs), yet spent incalculable sums on ornamental stones both for public and private ends. One is struck by

A certain waste of material; either the expense was deliberately disregarded or finer methods of working the stones were not yet in vogue. A revolution in the technique of stone-cutting must have set in soon after his death, for thenceforward we find the most intractable rocks cut into slices thin as card-board: too thin for pavements, and presumably for encrusting walls and colonnades. The Augustans, unable to produce these effects naturally, attempted imitation-stones, and with wonderful success. I have a fragment of their plaster postiche copying the close-grained Egyptian granite; the oily lustre of the quartz is so fresh and the peculiar structure of the rock, with its mica scintillations, so admirably rendered as to deceive, after two thousand years, the eye of a trained mineralogist.]

Here I sit, on the tepid shingle, listening to the plash of the waves and watching the sun as it sinks over the western mountains that are veiled in mists during the full daylight, but loom up, at this sunset hour, as from a fabulous world of gold. Yonder lies the Calabrian Sila forest, the brigands' country. I will attack it by way of Rossano, and thence wander, past Longobucco, across the whole region. It may be well, after all, to come again into contact with streams and woodlands, after this drenching of classical associations and formal civic life!

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