r perceived that his whole
life was a steady retrogression of all his faculties, of his hopes, his
joys--a species of gradual renunciation--and that the circle was slowly
but inexorably narrowing round him.

Among other fundamental maxims his father had given him the following:
You must _make_ your own life as you would any other work of art. The
life of a man of intellect should be of his own designing. Herein lies
the only true superiority.

Again: Never, let it cost what it may, lose the mastery over yourself
even in the most intoxicating rapture of the senses. _Habere non haberi_
is the rule from which the man of intellect should never swerve.

And again--Regret is the idle pastime of an unoccupied mind. The best
method, therefore, to avoid regret is to keep the mind constantly
occupied with new fancies, fresh sensations.

Unfortunately, however, these _voluntary_ axioms, which from their
ambiguity might just as easily be interpreted as lofty moral rules, fell
upon an _involuntary_ nature; that is to say, one in which the will
power was extremely feeble.

Another seed sown by the paternal hand had borne evil fruit in Andrea's
spirit--the seed of sophistry. Sophistry, said this imprudent teacher,
is at the bottom of all human pleasure or pain. Therefore, quicken and
multiply your sophisms and you quicken and multiply your own pleasure or
your own pain. It is possible that the whole science of life consists in
obscuring the truth. The word is a very profound matter in which
inexhaustible treasure is concealed for the man who knows how to use it.
The Greeks, who were artists in words, were the most refined
voluptuaries of antiquity. The sophists flourished in the greatest
number during the age of Pericles, the Golden Age of pleasure.

This germ had found a favourable soil in the unhealthy culture of the
young man's mind. By degrees, insincerity--rather towards himself than
towards others--became such a habit of Andrea's mind, that finally he
was incapable of being wholly sincere or of regaining dominion over
himself.

The death of his father left him alone at the age of twenty, master of a
considerable fortune, separated from his mother, and at the mercy of his
passions and his tastes. He spent fifteen months in England. His mother
married again, and he returned to Rome from choice.

Rome was his passion--not the Rome of the Caesars, but the Rome of the
Popes--not the Rome of the Triumphal Arches, the Forums,