ight out of the
clay--childish still, moreover, and with no more suspicion of
pasteboard than the old Romans themselves, in its unabashed love of
open-air pageantries, has invested this, the greatest, and alas! the
most characteristic, of the splendours of imperial Rome, with a reality
livelier than any description. The homely sentiments for which he has
found place in his learned paintings are hardly more lifelike than the
great public incidents of the show, there depicted. And then, with all
that vivid realism, how refined, how dignified, how select in type, is
this reflection of the old Roman world!--now especially, in its
time-mellowed red and gold, for the modern visitor to the old English
palace.

[199] It was under no such selected types that the great procession
presented itself to Marius; though, in effect, he found something there
prophetic, so to speak, and evocative of ghosts, as susceptible minds
will do, upon a repetition after long interval of some notable
incident, which may yet perhaps have no direct concern for themselves.
In truth, he had been so closely bent of late on certain very personal
interests that the broad current of the world's doings seemed to have
withdrawn into the distance, but now, as he witnessed this procession,
to return once more into evidence for him. The world, certainly, had
been holding on its old way, and was all its old self, as it thus
passed by dramatically, accentuating, in this favourite spectacle, its
mode of viewing things. And even apart from the contrast of a very
different scene, he would have found it, just now, a somewhat vulgar
spectacle. The temples, wide open, with their ropes of roses flapping
in the wind against the rich, reflecting marble, their startling
draperies and heavy cloud of incense, were but the centres of a great
banquet spread through all the gaudily coloured streets of Rome, for
which the carnivorous appetite of those who thronged them in the glare
of the mid-day sun was frankly enough asserted. At best, they were but
calling their gods to share with them the cooked, sacrificial, and
other meats, reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned for the
sorrows of one of [200] those Northern captives as he passed by, and
explained to his comrade--"There's feeling in that hand, you know!"
benumbed and lifeless as it looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment,
to transform the entire show into its own proper tinsel. Yes! these
Romans were a co