he living Rome itself. The grandeur of the
ruins of Rome,--heroism in ruin: it was under the influence of an
imaginative anticipation of this, that he appeared to be speaking. And
though the impression of the actual greatness of Rome on that day was
but enhanced by the strain of contempt, falling with an accent of
pathetic conviction from the emperor himself, and gaining from his
pontifical pretensions the authority of a religious intimation, yet the
curious interest of the discourse lay in this, that Marius, for one, as
he listened, seemed to forsee a grass-grown Forum, the broken ways of
the Capitol, and the Palatine hill itself in humble occupation. That
impression connected itself with what he had already noted of an actual
change even then coming over Italian scenery. Throughout, he could
trace something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to
fall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost
inhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the
paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic
pride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from its
opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth--the
imperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the middle age,
was ready, in no friendly humour, to mock, there in its narrow bed, the
corpse which had made so much of itself in life. Marius could but
contrast all that with his own Cyrenaic eagerness, just then, to taste
and see and touch; reflecting on the opposite issues deducible from the
same text. "The world, within me and without, flows away like a
river," he had said; "therefore let me make the most of what is here
and now."--"The world and the thinker upon it, are consumed like a
flame," said Aurelius, "therefore will I turn away my eyes from vanity:
renounce: withdraw myself alike from all affections." He seemed
tacitly to claim as a sort of personal dignity, that he was very
familiarly versed in this view of things, and could discern a
death's-head everywhere. Now and again Marius was reminded of the
saying that "with the Stoics all people are the vulgar save
themselves;" and at times the orator seemed to have forgotten his
audience, and to be speaking only to himself.

"Art thou in love with men's praises, get thee into the very soul of
them, and see!--see what judges they be, even in those matters which
concern themselves. Wouldst thou have their praise a