He had to traverse a long subterranean gallery, once a secret entrance to the imperial apartments, and in our own day, amid the ruin of all around it, as smooth and fresh as if the carpets were but just removed from its floor after the return of the emperor from the shows.

It was here, on such an occasion, that the emperor Caligula, at the age of twenty-nine, had come by his end, the assassins gliding along it as he lingered a few moments longer to watch the movements of a party of noble youths at their exercise in the courtyard below.

As Marius waited, a second time, in that little red room in the house of the chief chamberlain, curious to look once more upon its painted walls--the very place whither the assassins were said to have turned for refuge after the murder--he could all but see the figure, which in its surrounding light and darkness seemed to him the most melancholy in the entire history of Rome.

He called to mind the greatness of that popularity and early [34] promise--the stupefying height of irresponsible power, from which, after all, only men's viler side had been clearly visible--the overthrow of reason--the seemingly irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines.

Popular hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved in the museum of the Capitol, may have seemed to some visitors there perhaps the finest extant relic of Roman art.