ertain aristocratic poet who loved
every sort of superiorities; and Marius was favoured with an invitation
to a supper given in his honour.

It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early
boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself,
seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the
point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its
object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the
foot-ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered
round a single great house under shadow of the "haunted" ruins of
Cicero's villa on the wooded heights. He found a touch of weirdness in
the circumstance that in so romantic a place he had been bidden to meet
the writer who was come to seem almost like one of the personages in
his own fiction. As he turned now and then to gaze at the evening
scene through the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the
cattle were going home slowly from the [77] pastures below, the Alban
mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses,
seemed close at hand--a screen of vaporous dun purple against the
setting sun--with those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary
lines which indicate volcanic formation. The coolness of the little
brown market-place, for profit of which even the working-people, in
long file through the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the
night, was grateful, after the heats of Rome. Those wild country
figures, clad in every kind of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind and
weather fortunately enough for the eye, under that significant light
inclined him to poetry. And it was a very delicate poetry of its kind
that seemed to enfold him, as passing into the poet's house he paused
for a moment to glance back towards the heights above; whereupon, the
numerous cascades of the precipitous garden of the villa, framed in the
doorway of the hall, fell into a harmless picture, in its place among
the pictures within, and scarcely more real than they--a
landscape-piece, in which the power of water (plunging into what unseen
depths!) done to the life, was pleasant, and without its natural
terrors.

At the further end of this bland apartment, fragrant with the rare
woods of the old inlaid panelling, the falling of aromatic oil from the
ready-lighted lamps, the iris-root clinging to the dresses of the
guests, as with odours from the [78] altars of the gods,