words he had found for conveying, with a single touch, the sense of
textures, colours, [57] incidents! "Like jewellers' work! Like a
myrrhine vase!"--admirers said of his writing. "The golden fibre in
the hair, the gold thread-work in the gown marked her as the
mistress"--aurum in comis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum,
matronam profecto confitebatur--he writes, with his "curious
felicity," of one of his heroines. Aurum intextum: gold fibre:--
well! there was something of that kind in his own work. And then, in
an age when people, from the emperor Aurelius downwards, prided
themselves unwisely on writing in Greek, he had written for Latin
people in their own tongue; though still, in truth, with all the care
of a learned language. Not less happily inventive were the incidents
recorded--story within story--stories with the sudden, unlooked-for
changes of dreams. He had his humorous touches also. And what went
to the ordinary boyish taste, in those somewhat peculiar readers,
what would have charmed boys more purely boyish, was the adventure:--
the bear loose in the house at night, the wolves storming the farms
in winter, the exploits of the robbers, their charming caves, the
delightful thrill one had at the question--"Don't you know that these
roads are infested by robbers?"

The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of
witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old
weird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the more
genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when
she fled through that country, were still in use. In the city of
Hypata, indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self--"You might think
that through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had
been changed into forms not their own; that there was humanity in the
hardness of the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heard