d as he. The
purple had done its work. History has left the rise of this emperor
conjectural; his fall is written in blood. As he began he ended, a poet
and a beast.

Presently he was in Rome. It was not homesickness that took him there;
he was far too cosmopolitan to suffer from any such malady as that. It
was the accumulations of a fifteen-year excursion through the
metropoles of art which demanded a gallery of their own. Another with
similar tastes and similar power might have ordered everything which
pleasured his eye to be carted to Rome, but in his quality of artifex
omnipotens Hadrian embellished and never sacked. There were painters
and sculptors enough in that army at his heels, and whatever appealed
to him was copied on the spot. So much was copied that a park of ten
square miles was just large enough to form the open-air museum which he
had designed, one which centuries of excavation have not exhausted yet.

The museum became a mad-house. Hadrian was ill; tired in mind and body,
smitten with imperialia. It was then the young Verus died, leaving for
a wonder a child behind, and more wonderful still, Antonin was adopted.
Through Rome, meanwhile, terror stalked. Hadrian, in search of a remedy
against his increasing confusion of mind, his visible weakness of body,
turned from physicians to oracles; from them to magic, and then to
blood. He decimated the senate. Soldiers, freemen, citizens, anybody
and everybody were ordered off to death. He tried to kill himself and
failed; he tried again, wondering, no doubt, why he who commanded death
for others could not command it for himself. Presently he succeeded,
and Antonin--the pious Antonin, as the senate called him--marshalled
from cellars and crypts the senators and citizens whom Hadrian had
ordered to be destroyed.

VIII

FAUSTINE

Anyone who has loitered a moment among the statues in the Salle des
Antonins at the Louvre will recall the bust of the Empress Faustina. It
stands near the entrance, coercing the idler to remove his hat; to stop
a moment, to gaze and dream. The face differs from that which Mr.
Swinburne has described. In the poise of the head, in the expression of
the lips, particularly in the features which, save the low brow, are
not of the Roman type, there is a commingling of just that loveliness
and melancholy which must have come to Psyche when she lost her god. In
the corners of the mouth, in the droop of the eyelids, in the moulding