allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world
that then was?--And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to
say,--and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in
saying it,--that though Julian was hateful to God, he was
altogether beneficent to mankind.

I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself
said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but
gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the
driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have
used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he
go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light
beyond any that was in Rome? ... Or was it the supreme mistake of
his life.... one would say the only mistake?

It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing;
and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him
then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure.
Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best
of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him
as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man
for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without
opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein
Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;--unless
you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a
phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water,
without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam
of aspiration,--with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by
no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and
from ruin.

XXIV. FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA

When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that
the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown
insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;--and while three parts
of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the
Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an
end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good
harmless useful fictions--probably fictions) so fearfully in
earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end
of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and
over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in
Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century's time the
empire and all its culture would