of executor,
and found it full of priceless works of art, which, though neither so
difficult to procure at that time nor so costly as they would be now,
were yet sufficiently valuable to have necessitated an unjustifiable
outlay.

The situation of the building fostered his infatuation for the past. It
lay between the Bay of Naples and the Bay of Baia, and from its windows
commanded the same exquisite view which had charmed Cicero and Lucullus,
Severus and the Antonines. Hard by stood Baia, the princely seaside
resort of the empire. That most luxurious and wanton of all cities of
antiquity survived the cataclysms of ages, and only lost its civic
continuity and became the ruined village of to-day in the sack of the
fifteenth century. But a continuity of wickedness is not so easily
broken, and those who know the spot best say that it is still instinct
with memories of a shameful past.

For miles along that haunted coast the foot cannot be put down except on
the ruins of some splendid villa, and over all there broods a spirit of
corruption and debasement actually sensible and oppressive. Of the dawns
and sunsets, of the noonday sun tempered by the sea-breeze and the shade
of scented groves, those who have been there know the charm, and to
those who have not no words can describe it. But there are malefic
vapours rising from the corpse of a past not altogether buried, and most
cultivated Englishmen who tarry there long feel their influence as did
John Maltravers. Like so many _decepti deceptores_ of the Neo-Platonic
school, he did not practise the abnegation enjoined by the very cult he
professed to follow. Though his nature was far too refined, I believe,
ever to sink into the sensualism revealed in Temple's diaries, yet it
was through the gratification of corporeal tastes that he endeavoured
to achieve the divine _extasis_; and there were constantly lavish and
sumptuous entertainments at the villa, at which strange guests were
present.

In such a nightmare of a life it was not to be expected that any mind
would find repose, and Maltravers certainly found none. All those cares
which usually occupy men's minds, all thoughts of wife, child, and home
were, it is true, abandoned; but a wild unrest had hold of him, and
never suffered him to be at ease. Though he never told me as much, yet
I believe he was under the impression that the form which he had seen
at Oxford and Royston had reappeared to him on more than one subsequ