456 MERGE TO GYRENE.

as the interior is much incumbered with soil washed in through the door-way from without, we could not say decidedly that there is no place for a second body beneath the upper one, without some previous excavation.

The cella is not placed opposite to the entrance of the tomb, as is usual in other examples, but on the right hand side of it in entering ; and this arrangement has been made in conformity with the position of the rock in which it is excavated, and not from any caprice on the part of the architect. The date of this tomb would appear, from its architectural details, to be posterior to the time of the Ptolemies ; but no degeneracy of style is observable in the paintings, which would not disgrace the best periods of Grecian art. We must at the same time recollect, that the architecture employed in the decoration of excavated tombs is not to be judged by so severe a standard as that which is applicable to the exteriors of buildings ; the details in the first case are purely ornamental, and may be placed in the same scale with those of interiors, in which the fancy of the architect is always left more at liberty than it can be allowed to be in external decoration : and what would therefore be bad taste in one of these instances is not necessarily such in the other. Neither does it appear to have been the practice of the ancients to give an air of gloom or sadness to the abodes which they allotted to the service of the dead, and on which they have bestowed, at all periods, so much labour and expense. We find historic, allegorical, and pastoral subjects represented on such occasions in the gayest colours ; as if it had been their wish to disarm death of its terrors, and to mode-