and gilt ivory bosses at the ends of the roller.

And the inside was something not less dainty and fine, full of the
archaisms and curious felicities in which that generation delighted,
quaint terms and images picked fresh from the early dramatists, the
lifelike phrases of some lost poet preserved by an old grammarian, racy
morsels of the vernacular and studied prettinesses:--all alike, mere
playthings for the genuine power and natural eloquence of the erudite
artist, unsuppressed by his erudition, which, however, made some people
angry, chiefly less well "got-up" people, and especially those who were
untidy from indolence.

No! it was certainly not that old-fashioned, unconscious ease of the
early literature, which could never come again; which, after all, had
had more in common with the "infinite patience" of Apuleius than with
the hack-work readiness of his detractors, who might so well have been
"self-conscious" of going slip-shod. And at least his success was
unmistakable as to the precise literary effect he had intended,
including a certain tincture of "neology" in expression--nonnihil
interdum elocutione novella parum signatum--in the language of
Cornelius Fronto, the contemporary prince of rhetoricians. What words
he had found for conveying, with a single touch, the sense of textures,
colours, [57] incidents! "Like jewellers' work! Like a myrrhine
vase!"--admirers said of his writing. "The golden fibre in the hair,
the gold thread-work in the gown marked her as the mistress"--aurum in
comis et in tunicis, ibi inflexum hic intextum, matronam profecto
confitebatur--he writes, with his "curious felicity," of one of his
heroines. Aurum intextum: gold fibre:--well! there was something of
that kind in his own work. And then, in an age when people, from the
emperor Aurelius downwards, prided themselves unwisely on writing in
Greek, he had written for Latin people in their own tongue; though
still, in truth, with all the care of a learned language. Not less
happily inventive were the incidents recorded--story within
story--stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams. He had
his humorous touches also. And what went to the ordinary boyish taste,
in those somewhat peculiar readers, what would have charmed boys more
purely boyish, was the adventure:--the bear loose in the house at
night, the wolves storming the farms in winter, the exploits of the
robbers, their charming caves, the delightful thrill o