latial dignity being felt only in a peculiar sense of order, the
absence [216] of all that was casual, of vulgarity and discomfort. A
merely official residence of his predecessors, the Palatine had become
the favourite dwelling-place of Aurelius; its many-coloured memories
suiting, perhaps, his pensive character, and the crude splendours of
Nero and Hadrian being now subdued by time. The window-less Roman abode
must have had much of what to a modern would be gloom. How did the
children, one wonders, endure houses with so little escape for the eye
into the world outside? Aurelius, who had altered little else,
choosing to live there, in a genuine homeliness, had shifted and made
the most of the level lights, and broken out a quite medieval window
here and there, and the clear daylight, fully appreciated by his
youthful visitor, made pleasant shadows among the objects of the
imperial collection. Some of these, indeed, by reason of their Greek
simplicity and grace, themselves shone out like spaces of a purer,
early light, amid the splendours of the Roman manufacture.

Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough,
he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those pitiless
headaches, which since boyhood had been the "thorn in his side,"
challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble
endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering the spectacle
of the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to be in [217]
private conversation with him. There was much in the philosophy of
Aurelius--much consideration of mankind at large, of great bodies,
aggregates and generalities, after the Stoic manner--which, on a nature
less rich than his, might have acted as an inducement to care for
people in inverse proportion to their nearness to him. That has
sometimes been the result of the Stoic cosmopolitanism. Aurelius,
however, determined to beautify by all means, great or little, a
doctrine which had in it some potential sourness, had brought all the
quickness of his intelligence, and long years of observation, to bear
on the conditions of social intercourse. He had early determined "not
to make business an excuse to decline the offices of humanity--not to
pretend to be too much occupied with important affairs to concede what
life with others may hourly demand;" and with such success, that, in an
age which made much of the finer points of that intercourse, it was
felt