s, and Crete, and how they quaff in gold,
Crystal, and myrrhine cups, embossed with gems
And studs of pearl." [19]

Still less can we pretend to describe the unblushing and unutterable
degradation of this period as it is revealed to us by the poets and the
satirists. "All things," says Seneca, "are full of iniquity and vice;
more crime is committed than can be remedied by restraint. We struggle
in a huge contest of criminality: daily the passion for sin is greater,
the shame in committing it is less.... Wickedness is no longer committed
in secret: it flaunts before our eyes, and

"The citron board, the bowl embossed with gems,
... whatever is known
Of rarest acquisition; Tyrian garbs,
Neptunian Albion's high testaceous food,
And flavoured Chian wines, with incense fumed,
To slake patrician thirst: for these their rights
In the vile atreets they prostitute for sale,
Their ancient rights, their dignities, their laws,
Their native glorious freedom.

has been sent forth so openly into public sight, and has prevailed so
completely in the breast of all, that innocence is not _rare_, but
_non-existent_."

[Footnote 19: Compare the lines in Dyer's little-remembered _Ruins of
Rome_.]

IV. And it was an age of deep sadness. That it should have been so is an
instructive and solemn lesson. In proportion to the luxury of the age
were its misery and its exhaustion. The mad pursuit of pleasure was the
death and degradation of all true happiness. Suicide--suicide out of
pure _ennui_ and discontent at a life overflowing with every possible
means of indulgence--was extraordinarily prevalent. The Stoic
philosophy, especially as we see it represented in the tragedies
attributed to Seneca, rang with the glorification of it. Men ran to
death because their mode of life had left them no other refuge. They
died because it seemed so tedious and so superfluous to be seeing and
doing and saying the same things over and over again; and because they
had exhausted the very possibility of the only pleasures of which they
had left themselves capable. The satirical epigram of Destouches,--

"Ci-git Jean Rosbif, ecuyer,
Qui se pendit pour se desennuyer,"

was literally and strictly true of many Romans during this epoch.
Marcellinus, a young and wealthy noble, starved himself, and then had
himself suffocated in a warm bath, merely because he was attacked