thing on every side, this development of the family
did but carry forward, and give effect to, the purposes, the kindness,
of nature itself, friendly to man. As if by way of a due recognition
of some immeasurable divine condescension manifest in a [111] certain
historic fact, its influence was felt more especially at those points
which demanded some sacrifice of one's self, for the weak, for the
aged, for little children, and even for the dead. And then, for its
constant outward token, its significant manner or index, it issued in a
certain debonair grace, and a certain mystic attractiveness, a
courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that famed Greek
"blitheness," or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life, had been,
after all, an unrivalled success. Contrasting with the incurable
insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the higher Roman life, of
what was still truest to the primitive soul of goodness amid its evil,
the new creation he now looked on--as it were a picture beyond the
craft of any master of old pagan beauty--had indeed all the appropriate
freshness of a "bride adorned for her husband." Things new and old
seemed to be coming as if out of some goodly treasure-house, the brain
full of science, the heart rich with various sentiment, possessing
withal this surprising healthfulness, this reality of heart.

"You would hardly believe," writes Pliny,--to his own wife!--"what a
longing for you possesses me. Habit--that we have not been used to be
apart--adds herein to the primary force of affection. It is this keeps
me awake at night fancying I see you beside me. That is why my feet
take me unconsciously to your sitting-room at those hours when I was
wont to [112] visit you there. That is why I turn from the door of the
empty chamber, sad and ill-at-ease, like an excluded lover."--

There, is a real idyll from that family life, the protection of which
had been the motive of so large a part of the religion of the Romans,
still surviving among them; as it survived also in Aurelius, his
disposition and aims, and, spite of slanderous tongues, in the attained
sweetness of his interior life. What Marius had been permitted to see
was a realisation of such life higher still: and with--Yes! with a more
effective sanction and motive than it had ever possessed before, in
that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would.

The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had