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.