tails of attire and manner, as upon
the one thing needful. Certainly, flowers were pleasant to the eye.
Such things had even their sober use, as making the outside of human
life superficially attractive, and thereby promoting the first steps
towards friendship and social amity. But what precise place could
there be for Verus and his peculiar charm, [197] in that Wisdom, that
Order of divine Reason "reaching from end to end, strongly and sweetly
disposing all things," from the vision of which Aurelius came down, so
tolerant of persons like him? Into such vision Marius too was
certainly well-fitted to enter, yet, noting the actual perfection of
Lucius Verus after his kind, his undeniable achievement of the select,
in all minor things, felt, though with some suspicion of himself, that
he entered into, and could understand, this other so dubious sort of
character also. There was a voice in the theory he had brought to Rome
with him which whispered "nothing is either great nor small;" as there
were times when he could have thought that, as the "grammarian's" or
the artist's ardour of soul may be satisfied by the perfecting of the
theory of a sentence, or the adjustment of two colours, so his own life
also might have been fulfilled by an enthusiastic quest after
perfection--say, in the flowering and folding of a toga.

The emperors had burned incense before the image of Jupiter, arrayed in
its most gorgeous apparel, amid sudden shouts from the people of Salve
Imperator! turned now from the living princes to the deity, as they
discerned his countenance through the great open doors. The imperial
brothers had deposited their crowns of myrtle on the richly embroidered
lapcloth of the god; and, with their chosen guests, sat down to a
public feast in the temple [198] itself. There followed what was,
after all, the great event of the day:--an appropriate discourse, a
discourse almost wholly de contemptu mundi, delivered in the presence
of the assembled Senate, by the emperor Aurelius, who had thus, on
certain rare occasions, condescended to instruct his people, with the
double authority of a chief pontiff and a laborious student of
philosophy. In those lesser honours of the ovation, there had been no
attendant slave behind the emperors, to make mock of their effulgence
as they went; and it was as if with the discretion proper to a
philosopher, and in fear of a jealous Nemesis, he had determined
himself to protest in time again