y
accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for
him as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude to
its writer, and saw in it doubtless [94] far more than was really there
for any other reader. It occupied always a peculiar place in his
remembrance, never quite losing its power in frequent return to it for
the revival of that first glowing impression.

Its effect upon the elder youth was a more practical one: it stimulated
the literary ambition, already so strong a motive with him, by a signal
example of success, and made him more than ever an ardent,
indefatigable student of words, of the means or instrument of the
literary art. The secrets of utterance, of expression itself, of that
through which alone any intellectual or spiritual power within one can
actually take effect upon others, to over-awe or charm them to one's
side, presented themselves to this ambitious lad in immediate connexion
with that desire for predominance, for the satisfaction of which
another might have relied on the acquisition and display of brilliant
military qualities. In him, a fine instinctive sentiment of the exact
value and power of words was connate with the eager longing for sway
over his fellows. He saw himself already a gallant and effective
leader, innovating or conservative as occasion might require, in the
rehabilitation of the mother-tongue, then fallen so tarnished and
languid; yet the sole object, as he mused within himself, of the only
sort of patriotic feeling proper, or possible, for one born of slaves.
The popular speech was gradually departing from the form [95] and rule
of literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial.
While the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously
pedantic, the colloquial idiom, on the other hand, offered a thousand
chance-tost gems of racy or picturesque expression, rejected or at
least ungathered by what claimed to be classical Latin. The time was
coming when neither the pedants nor the people would really understand
Cicero; though there were some indeed, like this new writer, Apuleius,
who, departing from the custom of writing in Greek, which had been a
fashionable affectation among the sprightlier wits since the days of
Hadrian, had written in the vernacular.

The literary programme which Flavian had already designed for himself
would be a