new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away.  Corresponding to the variety of human type there present, was the various expression of every form of human sorrow assuaged.  What desire, what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of aged men and women of humble condition?  Those young men, bent down so discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which there had certainly been no parallel in the older world.  Was some credible message from beyond ’the flaming rampart of the world’—­a message of hope regarding the place of men’s souls and their interest in the sum of things—­already moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and voices, now and here?  At least, there was a cleansing and kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make everything else Marius had ever known look comparatively vulgar and mean.”

The spectacle of the Sacrament adds its deep impression, “bread and wine especially—­pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards.  There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth’s gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch and see, in the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things.”

The sense of youth in it all was perhaps the dominating impression—­the youth that was yet old as the world in experience and discovery of the true meaning of life.  The young Christ was rejuvenating the world, and all things were being made new by him.

This is the climax of the book.  He meets Lucian the aged, who for a moment darkens his dawning faith, but that which has come to him has been no casual emotion, no forced or spectacular conviction.  He does not leap to the recognition of Christianity at first sight, but very quietly realises and accepts it as that secret after which his pagan idealism had been all the time groping.  The story closes amid scenes of plague and earthquake and martyrdom in which he and Cornelius are taken prisoners, and he dies at last a Christian.  “It was the same people who, in the grey, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the Church had always said, was a kind of Sacrament with plenary grace.”

Such is some very brief and inadequate conception of one of the most remarkable books of our time, a book “written to illustrate the highest ideal of the aesthetic life, and to prove that beauty may be made the object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere as any that asceticism inspires. Marius is an apology for the highest Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture