care to conceive of the thing rests with me." Yet
when his children fall sick or die, this pretence breaks down, and he
is broken-hearted: and one of the charms of certain of his letters
still extant, is his reference to those childish sicknesses.--"On my
return to Lorium," he writes, "I found my little lady--domnulam
meam--in a fever;" and again, in a letter to one of the most serious of
men, "You will be glad to hear that our little one is better, and
running about the room--parvolam nostram melius valere et intra
cubiculum discurrere."

The young Commodus had departed from the chamber, anxious to witness
the exercises of certain gladiators, having a native taste for such
company, inherited, according to popular rumour, from his true
father--anxious also to escape from the too impressive company of the
gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen, the
tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthday
congratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made a
part of the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing the
empress Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and hands.
Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the "Orator," favourite teacher of the
emperor's youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now the
undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, [222]
elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets of Rome,
had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a good
fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors or
rhetoricians. The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, always generous
to his teachers, arranging their very quarrels sometimes, for they were
not always fair to one another, had helped him to a really great place
in the world. But his sumptuous appendages, including the villa and
gardens of Maecenas, had been borne with an air perfectly becoming, by
the professor of a philosophy which, even in its most accomplished and
elegant phase, presupposed a gentle contempt for such things. With an
intimate practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, smiles,
disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind--a whole
accomplished rhetoric of daily life--he applied them all to the
promotion of humanity, and especially of men's family affection.
Through a long life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were,
surrounded by the gracious and soothing air of his own eloquence--the
f