the courses.'

'Better that sort of game, certainly, than a beast fight; but I cannot
stake my Sicilian--you have nothing so precious to stake me in return.'

'My Phillida--my beautiful dancing-girl!'

'I never buy women,' said the Greek, carelessly rearranging his chaplet.

The musicians, who were stationed in the portico without, had commenced
their office with the kid; they now directed the melody into a more
soft, a more gay, yet it may be a more intellectual strain; and they
chanted that song of Horace beginning 'Persicos odi', etc., so
impossible to translate, and which they imagined applicable to a feast
that, effeminate as it seems to us, was simple enough for the gorgeous
revelry of the time. We are witnessing the domestic, and not the
princely feast--the entertainment of a gentleman, not an emperor or a
senator.

'Ah, good old Horace!' said Sallust, compassionately; 'he sang well of
feasts and girls, but not like our modern poets.'

'The immortal Fulvius, for instance,' said Clodius.

'Ah, Fulvius, the immortal!' said the umbra.

'And Spuraena; and Caius Mutius, who wrote three epics in a year--could
Horace do that, or Virgil either said Lepidus. 'Those old poets all
fell into the mistake of copying sculpture instead of painting.
Simplicity and repose--that was their notion; but we moderns have fire,