etimes for
lengthy intervals, during which it was no idle self-indulgence, but a
necessity of his intellectual life, to "confess himself," with an
intimacy, seemingly rare among the ancients; ancient writers, at all
events, having been jealous, for the most part, of affording us so much
as a glimpse of that interior self, which in many cases would have
actually doubled the interest of their objective informations.

"If a particular tutelary or genius," writes Marius,--"according to old
belief, walks through life beside each one of us, mine is very
certainly a capricious creature. He fills one with wayward,
unaccountable, yet quite irresistible humours, [173] and seems always
to be in collusion with some outward circumstance, often trivial enough
in itself--the condition of the weather, forsooth!--the people one
meets by chance--the things one happens to overhear them say, veritable
enodioi symboloi,+ or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks
fancied--to push on the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into
weighty motives. It was doubtless a quite explicable, physical fatigue
that presented me to myself, on awaking this morning, so lack-lustre
and trite. But I must needs take my petulance, contrasting it with my
accustomed morning hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of
a decay in the very capacity of enjoyment. We need some imaginative
stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and
transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year,
without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of
life. "Then, how if appetite, be it for real or ideal, should itself
fail one after awhile? Ah, yes! is it of cold always that men die; and
on some of us it creeps very gradually. In truth, I can remember just
such a lack-lustre condition of feeling once or twice before. But I
note, that it was accompanied then by an odd indifference, as the
thought of them occurred to me, in regard to the sufferings of
others--a kind of callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark
the humour it accompanied as a palpably morbid one [174] that could not
last. Were those sufferings, great or little, I asked myself then, of
more real consequence to them than mine to me, as I remind myself that
'nothing that will end is really long'--long enough to be thought of
importance? But to-day, my own sense of fatigue, the pity I conceive
for myself, disposed me strongly to a tende