in his stoicism, and a sense of lights fading out into the night.  His words in praise of death, and much else of his, had of course a great distinction.  Yet in his private intercourse with Marcus Aurelius, Marius was not satisfied, nor was it the bleak sense that all is vanity which troubled him, but rather a feeling of mediocrity—­of a too easy acceptance of the world—­in the imperial philosophy.  For in the companionship of Cornelius there was a foil to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, and his friend was more truly an aristocrat than his Emperor.  Cornelius did not accept the world in its entirety, either sadly or otherwise.  In him there was “some inward standard ... of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period and the corrupt life across which they were moving together.”  And, apparently as a consequence of this spirit of selection, “with all the severity of Cornelius, there was a breeze of hopefulness—­freshness and hopefulness—­as of new morning, about him.”  Already, it may be, the quick intelligence of the reader has guessed what is coming.  Jesus Christ said of Himself on one occasion, “For distinctions I am come into the world.”  Marius’ criticism of the Emperor reached its climax in his disgust at the amusements of the amphitheatre, which also Marcus Aurelius accepted.

There follows a long account of Roman life and thought, with much speculation as to the ideal commonwealth.  That dream of the philosophers remains for ever in the air, detached from actual experiences and institutions, but Marius felt himself passing beyond it to something in which it would be actually realised and visibly localised, “the unseen Rome on high.”  Thus in correcting and supplementing the philosophies, and in insisting upon some actual embodiment of them on the earth, he is groping his way point by point to Christ.  The late Dean Church has said:  “No one can read the wonderful sayings of Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, without being impressed, abashed perhaps, by their grandeur.  No one can read them without wondering the next moment why they fell so dead—­how little response they seem to have awakened round them.”  It is precisely at this point that the young Christian Church found its opportunity.  Pagan idealisms were indeed in the air.  The Christian idealism was being realised upon the earth, and it was this with which Marius was now coming into contact.

So he goes on until he is led up to two curious houses.  The first of these was the house of Apuleius, where in a subtle and brilliant system of ideas it seemed as if a ladder had been set up from earth to heaven.  But Marius discovered that what he wanted was the thing itself and not its mere theory, a life of realised ideals and not a dialectic.  The second house was more curious still.  Much pains is spent upon the description of it with its “quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste,” in which both colour and form, alike of stones and flowers, seemed