ich he could not at the time explain, but which after-events have
convinced me was the haunting suggestion of the _Gagliarda_, drove him
to visit the scenes mentioned so often in Temple's diary. He had always
been an excellent scholar, and a classic of more than ordinary ability.
Rome and Southern Italy filled him with a strange delight. His education
enabled him to appreciate to the full what he saw; he peopled the stage
with the figures of the original actors, and tried to assimilate his
thought to theirs. He began reading classical literature widely, no
longer from the scholarly but the literary standpoint. In Rome he
spent much time in the librarians' shops, and there met with copies
of the numerous authors of the later empire and of those Alexandrine
philosophers which are rarely seen in England. In these he found a new
delight and fresh food for his mysticism.

Such study, if carried to any extent, is probably dangerous to the
English character, and certainly was to a man of Maltravers's romantic
sympathies. This reading produced in time so real an effect upon his
mind that if he did not definitely abandon Christianity, as I fear he
did, he at least adulterated it with other doctrines till it became to
him Neo-Platonism. That most seductive of philosophies, which has
enthralled so many minds from Proclus and Julian to Augustine and the
Renaissancists, found an easy convert in John Maltravers. Its passionate
longing for the vague and undefined good, its tolerance of aesthetic
impressions, the pleasant superstitions of its dynamic pantheism, all
touched responsive chords in his nature. His mind, he told me, became
filled with a measureless yearning for the old culture of pagan
philosophy, and as the past became clearer and more real, so the present
grew dimmer, and his thoughts were gradually weaned entirely from all
the natural objects of affection and interest which should otherwise
have occupied them. To what a terrible extent this process went on, Miss
Maltravers's narrative shows. Soon after reaching Naples he visited the
Villa de Angelis, which Temple had built on the ruins of a sea-house of
Pomponius. The later building had in its turn become dismantled and
ruinous, and Sir John found no difficulty in buying the site outright.
He afterwards rebuilt it on an elaborate scale, endeavouring to
reproduce in its equipment the luxury of the later empire. I had
occasion to visit the house more than once in my capacity