ng
to them quietly about the beauty and dignity of death, and the
divinity of the Soul; then suddenly inquiring why Anatolius was
not present,--and learning that Anatolius had fallen,--and
(strange inconsistency!) the dying man breaking into tears of the
death of his friend.--And you will know of the hopeless march of
the army back under ignominious Jovian, all Shah Sapor's hard
terms accepted;--and the doom of the Roman Empire sealed.

That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed
upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him:
the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compassionate
Gods.... It is true there was a personality attached; and all
his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had
not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain
self-consciousness... Well; he was very young; he died a very
boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:--in
a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have
followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended,
when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So
he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;--
and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the
_Misopogon,_ a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore
beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an
emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about
it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,--in the Gibbonistic
euphemism,--_populous;_ indeed, names the loathsome cootie
outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the
nature of things, this was a libel.

I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the
eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul
of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world,
will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting
the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into
mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his
battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to
outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had
shown the world what the Soul in action is like.

Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry
through as prolog to his life's work:--he must conquer the new
personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it
difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignit