Owing to his untiring energy and vast capacity for
business, he not only succeeded in reorganising every department of
the empire, social, political, fiscal, military, and municipal; but
he also held in his own hands the threads of all its complicated
machinery. He was strict in matters of routine, and appears to have
been almost a martinet among his legions: yet in social intercourse
he lived on terms of familiarity with inferiors, combining the
graces of elegant conversation with the _bonhomie_ of boon
companionship, displaying a warm heart to his friends, and using
magnificent generosity. He restored the domestic as well as the
military discipline of the Roman world; and his code of laws lasted
till Justinian. Among many of his useful measures of reform he
issued decrees restricting the power of masters over their slaves,
and depriving them of their old capital jurisdiction. His
biographers find little to accuse him of beyond a singular avidity
for fame, addiction to magic arts and luxurious vices: yet they
adduce no proof of his having, at any rate before the date of his
final retirement to his Tiburtine villa, shared the crimes of a Nero
or a Commodus. On the whole, we must recognise in Hadrian a nature
of extraordinary energy, capacity for administrative government, and
mental versatility. A certain superficiality, vulgarity, and
commonplaceness seems to have been forced upon him by the
circumstances of his age, no less than by his special temperament.
This quality of the immitigable commonplace is clearly written on
his many portraits. Their chief interest consists in a fixed
expression of fatigue--as though the man were weary with much
seeking and with little finding. In all things, he was somewhat of a
dilettante; and the Nemesis of that sensibility to impressions which
distinguishes the dilettante, came upon him ere he died. He ended
his days in an appalling and persistent paroxysm of _ennui_,
desiring the death which would not come to his relief.

The whole creative and expansive force of Hadrian's century lay
concealed in the despised Christian sect. Art was expiring in a
sunset blaze of gorgeous imitation, tasteless grandeur, technical
elaboration. Philosophy had become sophistical or mystic; its real
life survived only in the phrase 'entbehren sollst du, sollst
entbehren' of the Stoics. Literature was repetitive and scholastic.
Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Juvenal indeed were living; but
their works