Had the very seal of empire upon those sombre brows, reflected from his mirror, suggested his insane attempt upon the liberties, the dignity of men?
--"O humanity!" he seems to ask, "what hast thou done to me that I should so despise thee ?"--And might not this be indeed the true meaning of kingship, if the world would have one man to reign over it?
The like of this: or, some incredible, surely never to be realised, height of disinterestedness, in a king who should be the servant of all, quite at the other extreme of the practical dilemma involved in such a position.
Not till some while after his death had the body been decently interred by the piety of the sisters he had driven into exile.

Fraternity [35] of feeling had been no invariable feature in the incidents of Roman story.

One long Vicus Sceleratus, from its first dim foundation in fraternal quarrel on the morrow of a common deliverance so touching--had not almost every step in it some gloomy memory of unnatural violence?
Romans did well to fancy the traitress Tarpeia still "green in earth," crowned, enthroned, at the roots of the Capitoline rock.

If in truth the religion of Rome was everywhere in it, like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon the air, so also was the memory of crime prompted by a hypocritical cruelty, down to the erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly buried alive there, only eighty years ago, under Domitian.
It was with a sense of relief that Marius found himself in the presence of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered, raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then, although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed over it.

The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms.