follow him wherever he went.

Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with
an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were
times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was
merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and
circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had
been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them
all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of
the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It
seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him, and the
flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _taedium vitae_, that comes
on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
emerald at the red shambles of the Circus, and then, in a litter of
pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the
Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero
Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with
colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon
from Carthage, and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.

Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious
tapestries or cunningly-wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and
beautiful forms of those whom Vice and Blood and Weariness had made
monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife, and painted
her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the
dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the
Second