noble youths at their exercise in the courtyard below. As Marius
waited, a second time, in that little red room in the house of the
chief chamberlain, curious to look once more upon its painted walls--
the very place whither the assassins were said to have turned for
refuge after the murder--he could all but see the figure, which in
its surrounding light and darkness seemed to him the most melancholy
in the entire history of Rome. He called to mind the greatness of
that popularity and early [34] promise--the stupefying height of
irresponsible power, from which, after all, only men's viler side had
been clearly visible--the overthrow of reason--the seemingly
irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head in
which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he knew
not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for
the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular
hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to
be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful
perfection of finish, preserved in the museum of the Capitol, may
have seemed to some visitors there perhaps the finest extant relic of
Roman art. Had the very seal of empire upon those sombre brows,
reflected from his mirror, suggested his insane attempt upon the
liberties, the dignity of men?--"O humanity!" he seems to ask, "what
hast thou done to me that I should so despise thee?"--And might not
this be indeed the true meaning of kingship, if the world would have
one man to reign over it? The like of this: or, some incredible,
surely never to be realised, height of disinterestedness, in a king
who should be the servant of all, quite at the other extreme of the
practical dilemma involved in such a position. Not till some while
after his death had the body been decently interred by the piety of
the sisters he had driven into exile. Fraternity [35] of feeling had
been no invariable feature in the incidents of Roman story. One long