theirs. I would that a stronger love might
arise in my heart!

"Yet there is plenty of charity in the world. My patron, the Stoic
emperor, has made it even fashionable. To celebrate one of his brief
returns to Rome lately from the war, over and above a largess of gold
pieces to all who would, the public debts were forgiven. He made a nice
show of it: for once, the Romans entertained themselves with a
good-natured spectacle, and the whole town came to see the great
bonfire [178] in the Forum, into which all bonds and evidence of debt
were thrown on delivery, by the emperor himself; many private creditors
following his example. That was done well enough! But still the
feeling returns to me, that no charity of ours can get at a certain
natural unkindness which I find in things themselves.

"When I first came to Rome, eager to observe its religion, especially
its antiquities of religious usage, I assisted at the most curious,
perhaps, of them all, the most distinctly marked with that immobility
which is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony took
place at a singular spot some miles distant from the city, among the
low hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Aurelian Gate. There,
in a little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed their own way, age
after age--ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last, one over
the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a riotous
tangle of wild clematis--was to be found a magnificent sanctuary, in
which the members of the Arval College assembled themselves on certain
days. The axe never touched those trees--Nay! it was forbidden to
introduce any iron thing whatsoever within the precincts; not only
because the deities of these quiet places hate to be disturbed by the
harsh noise of metal, but also in memory of that better age--the lost
Golden Age--the homely age of the potters, of [179] which the central
act of the festival was a commemoration.

"The preliminary ceremonies were long and complicated, but of a
character familiar enough. Peculiar to the time and place was the
solemn exposition, after lavation of hands, processions backwards and
forwards, and certain changes of vestments, of the identical earthen
vessels--veritable relics of the old religion of Numa!--the vessels
from which the holy Numa himself had eaten and drunk, set forth above a
kind of altar, amid a cloud of flowers and incense, and many lights,
for the veneration of the