The parasite declared he should never forget the honour of the
commission, and left the room.

The sprightly Camilla, who had overheard Vetranio's command, jumped off
her couch, as soon as the parasite's back was turned, and running up to
the senator, began to reproach him for the determination he had just
formed.

'Have you no compunction at leaving me to the dulness of this horrible
palace, to satisfy your idle fancy for going to Rome,' said she,
pouting her pretty lip, and playing with a lock of the dark brown hair
that clustered over Vetranio's brow.

'Has the senator Vetranio so little regard for his friends as to leave
them to the mercy of the Goths?' said another lady, advancing with a
winning smile to Camilla's side.

'Ah, those Goths!' exclaimed Vetranio, turning to the last speaker.
'Tell me, Julia, is it not reported that the barbarians are really
marching into Italy?'

'Everybody has heard of it. The emperor is so discomposed by the
rumour, that he has forbidden the very name of the Goths to be
mentioned in his presence again.'

'For my part,' continued Vetranio, drawing Camilla towards him, and
playfully tapping her little dimpled hand, 'I am in anxious expectation
of the Goths, for I have designed a statue of Minerva, for which I can
find no model so fit as a woman of that troublesome nation. I am
informed upon good authority, that their limbs are colossal, and their
sense of propriety most obediently pliable under the discipline of the
purse.'

'If the Goths supply you with a model for anything,' said a courtier
who had joined the group while Vetranio was speaking, 'it will be with
a representation of the burning of your palace at Rome, which they will
enable you to paint from the inexhaustible reservoir of your own
wounds.'

The individual who uttered this last observation was remarkable among
the brilliant circle around him by his excessive ugliness. Urged by
his personal disadvantages, and the loss of all his property at the
gaming-table, he had latterly personated a character, the
accomplishments attached to which rescued him, by their disagreeable
originality in that frivolous age, from oblivion or contempt. He was a
Cynic philosopher.

His remark, however, produced no other effect on his hearers' serenity
than to excite their merriment. Vetranio laughed, Camilla laughed,
Julia laughed. The idea of a troop of barbarians ever being able to
burn a palace at Rome was too wildly ridi