first of all, statistics, a general historical account of the
writer's own time, and an exact diary; all alike, though in three
different degrees of nearness to the writer's own personal
experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was for the
instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found its way
into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the especial guidance of
his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break out, here
[46] and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into
conversations with the reader. And then, as though he were put off
his guard in this way, there had escaped into the heavy matter-of-
fact, of which the main portion was composed, morsels of his
conversation with himself. It was the romance of a soul (to be
traced only in hints, wayside notes, quotations from older masters),
as it were in lifelong, and often baffled search after some vanished
or elusive golden fleece, or Hesperidean fruit-trees, or some
mysterious light of doctrine, ever retreating before him. A man, he
had seemed to Marius from the first, of two lives, as we say. Of
what nature, he had sometimes wondered, on the day, for instance,
when he had interrupted the emperor's musings in the empty palace,
might be that placid inward guest or inhabitant, who from amid the
pre-occupations of the man of practical affairs looked out, as if
surprised, at the things and faces around. Here, then, under the
tame surface of what was meant for a life of business, Marius
discovered, welcoming a brother, the spontaneous self-revelation of a
soul as delicate as his own,--a soul for which conversation with
itself was a necessity of existence. Marius, indeed, had always
suspected that the sense of such necessity was a peculiarity of his.
But here, certainly, was another, in this respect like himself; and
again he seemed to detect the advent of some [47] new or changed
spirit into the world, mystic, inward, hardly to be satisfied with