when the whole coast of the Riviera will
be lined with winter resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will
surpass the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose which makes
the charm of San Remo.

THE POETRY OF WEALTH.

There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so
long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny
beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into
oblivion, the sight of Chateau d'If as it rises glowing from the blue
waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte
Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its
mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder
which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere
dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the
dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the
world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination
of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst
upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled in
senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant
as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The
feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of
vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the
encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the
freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded
treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first
time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of
wealth.

It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the
world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans,
and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose
actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the
wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow
accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its
enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought
home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have
felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when he
threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of
Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulatin