r's
productions--excuse me, gentlemen, I must once more look through the
sketches and plans."

The architect went away, but Pollux continued the conversation that had
been begun by saying:

"Only I cannot understand how a man who practises so many arts at once
as Hadrian does, and at the same time looks after the state and its
government, who is a passionate huntsman and who dabbles in every kind
of miscellaneous learning, contrives, when he wants to practise one
particular form of art, to recall all his five senses into the nest from
which he has let them fly, here, there, and everywhere. The inside
of his head must be like that salad-bowl--which we have reduced to
emptiness--in which Papias discovered three sorts of fish, brown and
white meat, oysters and five other substances."

"And who can deny," added Papias, "that if talent is the father, and
meat the mother of all productiveness, practice must be the artist's
teacher! Since Hadrian took to sculpture and painting it has become the
universal fashion here to practise these arts, and among the wealthier
youth who come to my workroom, many have very good abilities; but not
one of them brings anything to any good issue, because so much of their
time is taken up by the gymnasium, the bath, the quail-fights, the
suppers, and I know not what besides, so that they do nothing by way of
practice."

"True," said a painter. "Without the restraint and worry of
apprenticeship no one can ever rise to happy and independent
creativeness; and in the schools of rhetoric or in hunting or fighting
no one can study drawing. It is not till a pupil has learned to sit
steady and worry himself over his work for six hours on end that I begin
to believe he will ever do any good work. Have you any of you seen the
Emperor's work?"

"I have," answered a mosaic worker. "Many years ago Hadrian sent a
picture to me that he had painted; I was to make a mosaic from it. It
was a fruit piece. Melons, gourds, apples, and green leaves. The drawing
was but so-so, and the color impossibly vivid, still the composition was
pleasing from its solidity and richness. And after all, when one sees
it, one cannot but feel that such superfluity is better than meagreness
and feebleness. The larger fruits, especially under the exuberant sappy
foliage, were so huge that they might have been grown in the garden of
luxury itself, still the whole had a look of reality. I mitigated
the colors somewhat in my transcr