Like all other vital youths, Marius must eat of the tree of knowledge and become a questioner of hitherto accepted views.  “The tyrannous reality of things visible,” and all the eager desire and delight of youth, make their strong appeal.  Two influences favour the temptation.  First there is his friend, Flavian the Epicurean, of the school that delights in pleasure without afterthought, and is free from the burden and restraint of conscience; and later on, The Golden Book of Apuleius, with its exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, and its search for perfectness in the frankly material life.  The moral of its main story is that the soul must not look upon the face of its love, nor seek to analyse too closely the elements from which it springs.  Spirituality will be left desolate if it breaks this ban, and its wiser course is to enjoy without speculation.  Thus we see the youth drawn earthwards, yet with a clinging sense of far mystic reaches, which he refuses as yet to explore.  The death of Flavian rudely shatters this phase of his experience, and we find him face to face with death.  The section begins with the wonderful hymn of the Emperor Hadrian to his dying soul—­

     Dear wanderer, gipsy soul of mine,
     Sweet stranger, pleasing guest and comrade of my flesh,
     Whither away?  Into what new land,
     Pallid one, stoney one, naked one?

But the sheer spectacle and fact of death is too violent an experience for such sweet consolations, and the death of Flavian comes like a final revelation of nothing less than the soul’s extinction.  Not unnaturally, the next phase is a rebound into epicureanism, spiritual indeed in the sense that it could not stoop to low pleasures, but living wholly in the present none the less, with a strong and imperative appreciation of the fullness of earthly life.

The next phase of the life of Marius opens with a journey to Rome, during which he meets a second friend, the soldier Cornelius.  This very distinctly drawn character fascinates the eye from the first.  In him we meet a kind of earnestness which seems to interpret and fit in with the austere aspects of the landscape.  It is different from that disciplined hardness which was to be seen in Roman soldiers as the result of their military training; indeed, it seems as if this were some new kind of knighthood, whose mingled austerity and blitheness were strangely suggestive of hitherto unheard-of achievements in character.

The impression made by Rome upon the mind of Marius was a somewhat morbid one.  He was haunted more or less by the thought of its passing and its eventual ruin, and he found much, both in its religion and its pleasure, to criticise.  The dominant figure in the imperial city was that of Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, so famous in his day that for two hundred years after his death his image was cherished among the Penates of many pious families.  Amid much that was admirable in him, there was a certain chill