stocracy ever known on earth, tracing their lineage to the
times of Cato and boasting of their descent from the Scipios and the
Pompeys, accustomed themselves at last to regard money as the only test
of their own social position. The great Augustine found himself utterly
neglected at Rome because of his poverty,--being dependent on his
pupils, and they being mean enough to run away without paying him.
Literature languished and died, since it brought neither honor nor
emolument. No dignitary was respected for his office, only for his
gains; nor was any office prized which did not bring rich emoluments.
Corruption was so universal that an official in an important post was
sure of making a fortune in a short time. With such an idolatry of
money, all trades and professions which were not favorable to its
accumulation fell into disrepute, while those who administered to the
pleasures of a rich man were held in honor. Cooks, buffoons, and dancers
received the consideration which artists and philosophers enjoyed at
Athens in the days of Pericles. But artists and scholars were very few
indeed in the more degenerate days of the empire; nor would they have
had influence. The wit of a Petronius, the ridicule of a Martial, the
bitter sarcasm of a Juvenal were lost on a people abandoned to frivolous
gossip and demoralizing excesses. The haughty scorn with which a sensual
beauty, living on the smiles and purse of a fortunate glutton, would
pass in her gilded chariot some of the impoverished descendants of the
great Camillus might have provoked a smile, had any one been found, even
a neglected poet, to give them countenance and sympathy. But, alas!
everybody worshipped at the shrine of Mammon; everybody was valued for
what he _had_, rather than for what he _was_; and life was prized, not
for those pleasures which are cheap and free as heaven, not for quiet
tastes and rich affections and generous sympathies,--the glorious
certitudes of love, esteem, and friendship, which, "be they what they
may, are yet the fountain-life of all our day,"--but for the
gratification of depraved and expensive tastes, of those short-lived
enjoyments which ended with the decay of appetite and the _ennui_ of
realized expectation,--all of the earth, earthy; making a wreck of the
divine image which was made for God and heaven, preparing the way for a
most fearful retribution, and producing on contemplative minds a sadness
allied with despair, driving them to cav