it had caused was in his face, when
assisted by his daughter Gratia he took his place on the ivory chair,
as president of the Athenaeum of Rome, wearing with a wonderful grace
the philosophic pall,--in reality neither more nor less than the loose
woollen cloak of the common soldier, but fastened [5] on his right
shoulder with a magnificent clasp, the emperor's birthday gift.

It was an age, as abundant evidence shows, whose delight in rhetoric
was but one result of a general susceptibility--an age not merely
taking pleasure in words, but experiencing a great moral power in them.
Fronto's quaintly fashionable audience would have wept, and also
assisted with their purses, had his present purpose been, as sometimes
happened, the recommendation of an object of charity. As it was,
arranging themselves at their ease among the images and flowers, these
amateurs of exquisite language, with their tablets open for careful
record of felicitous word or phrase, were ready to give themselves
wholly to the intellectual treat prepared for them, applauding, blowing
loud kisses through the air sometimes, at the speaker's triumphant exit
from one of his long, skilfully modulated sentences; while the younger
of them meant to imitate everything about him, down to the inflections
of his voice and the very folds of his mantle. Certainly there was
rhetoric enough:--a wealth of imagery; illustrations from painting,
music, mythology, the experiences of love; a management, by which
subtle, unexpected meaning was brought out of familiar terms, like
flies from morsels of amber, to use Fronto's own figure. But with all
its richness, the higher claim of his style was rightly understood to
lie in gravity and self-command, and an especial care for the [6]
purities of a vocabulary which rejected every expression unsanctioned
by the authority of approved ancient models.

And it happened with Marius, as it will sometimes happen, that this
general discourse to a general audience had the effect of an utterance
adroitly designed for him. His conscience still vibrating painfully
under the shock of that scene in the amphitheatre, and full of the
ethical charm of Cornelius, he was questioning himself with much
impatience as to the possibility of an adjustment between his own
elaborately thought-out intellectual scheme and the "old morality." In
that intellectual scheme indeed the old morality had so far been
allowed no place, as seeming to demand from hi