I. GUESTS

"Your old men shall dream dreams."+

[75] A NATURE like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of
instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual
judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible than other men's
characters of essential change. And yet the experience of that
fortunate hour, seeming to gather into one central act of vision all
the deeper impressions his mind had ever received, did not leave him
quite as he had been. For his mental view, at least, it changed
measurably the world about him, of which he was still indeed a
curious spectator, but which looked further off, was weaker in its
hold, and, in a sense, less real to him than ever. It was as if he
viewed it through a diminishing glass. And the permanency of this
change he could note, some years later, when it [76] happened that he
was a guest at a feast, in which the various exciting elements of
Roman life, its physical and intellectual accomplishments, its
frivolity and far-fetched elegances, its strange, mystic essays after
the unseen, were elaborately combined. The great Apuleius, the
literary ideal of his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,--was now visiting
Tusculum, at the house of their common friend, a certain aristocratic
poet who loved every sort of superiorities; and Marius was favoured
with an invitation to a supper given in his honour.

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early
boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself,
seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the
point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its