, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered a few
moments longer to watch the movements of a party of noble youths at
their exercise in the courtyard below. As Marius waited, a second
time, in that little red room in the house of the chief chamberlain,
curious to look once more upon its painted walls--the very place
whither the assassins were said to have turned for refuge after the
murder--he could all but see the figure, which in its surrounding light
and darkness seemed to him the most melancholy in the entire history of
Rome. He called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early
[34] promise--the stupefying height of irresponsible power, from which,
after all, only men's viler side had been clearly visible--the
overthrow of reason--the seemingly irredeemable memory; and still,
above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the race of
Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of sensibility
and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass
onward to the Antonines. Popular hatred had been careful to destroy
its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark
bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved in
the museum of the Capitol, may have seemed to some visitors there
perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman art. Had the very seal of
empire upon those sombre brows, reflected from his mirror, suggested
his insane attempt upon the liberties, the dignity of men?--"O
humanity!" he seems to ask, "what hast thou done to me that I should so
despise thee?"--And might not this be indeed the true meaning of
kingship, if the world would have one man to reign over it? The like
of this: or, some incredible, surely never to be realised, height of
disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant of all, quite at
the other extreme of the practical dilemma involved in such a position.
Not till some while after his death had the body been decently interred
by the piety of the sisters he had driven into exile. Fraternity [35]
of feeling had been no invariable feature in the incidents of Roman
story. One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim foundation in
fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliverance so
touching--had not almost every step in it some gloomy memory of
unnatural violence? Romans did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia
still "green in earth," crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the
Capitoline rock. If in truth