his Marius followed with a
devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow.
After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered
impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of
their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred
presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe and
archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort
of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the
demand upon him of anything [18] in which deity was concerned. He must
satisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he
be found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys and
calamities--the happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which
it made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility
towards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment
concerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be
put off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean
speculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he had
learned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid many
fopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate all
his life long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself,
some great occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that should
consecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as the
early Christian looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his course,
as a seal of worth upon it.

The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the
face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the
white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to
the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble,
mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the
exquisite [19] fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two
centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses
which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the
marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds
had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden
and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation,
and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order re