applauding, blowing loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the
speaker's triumphant exit from one of his long, skilfully modulated
sentences; while the younger of them meant to imitate everything
about him, down to the inflections of his voice and the very folds of
his mantle. Certainly there was rhetoric enough:--a wealth of
imagery; illustrations from painting, music, mythology, the
experiences of love; a management, by which subtle, unexpected
meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like flies from morsels of
amber, to use Fronto's own figure. But with all its richness, the
higher claim of his style was rightly understood to lie in gravity
and self-command, and an especial care for the [6] purities of a
vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned by the
authority of approved ancient models.

And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an
utterance adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating
painfully under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full
of the ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with
much impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his
own elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the "old
morality." In that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had
so far been allowed no place, as seeming to demand from him the
admission of certain first principles such as might misdirect or
retard him in his efforts towards a complete, many-sided existence;
or distort the revelations of the experience of life; or curtail his
natural liberty of heart and mind. But now (his imagination being
occupied for the moment with the noble and resolute air, the
gallantry, so to call it, which composed the outward mien and
presentment of his strange friend's inflexible ethics) he felt