the craft of any master of old pagan beauty--had indeed all the
appropriate freshness of a "bride adorned for her husband." Things
new and old seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly treasure-
house, the brain full of science, the heart rich with various
sentiment, possessing withal this surprising healthfulness, this
reality of heart.

"You would hardly believe," writes Pliny,--to his own wife!--"what a
longing for you possesses me. Habit--that we have not been used to
be apart--adds herein to the primary force of affection. It is this
keeps me awake at night fancying I see you beside me. That is why my
feet take me unconsciously to your sitting-room at those hours when I
was wont to [112] visit you there. That is why I turn from the door
of the empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an excluded lover."--

There, is a real idyll from that family life, the protection of which
had been the motive of so large a part of the religion of the Romans,
still surviving among them; as it survived also in Aurelius, his
disposition and aims, and, spite of slanderous tongues, in the
attained sweetness of his interior life. What Marius had been
permitted to see was a realisation of such life higher still: and
with--Yes! with a more effective sanction and motive than it had ever
possessed before, in that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained
by those who would.

The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had
attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by
cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went
straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and
appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-