The remainder of my days in Rome were only three or four. I had seen much of it that has been in no way indicated here. True to my promise I had looked up at his hotel my traveling acquaintance, the able and distinguished Mr. H., and had walked about some of the older sections of the city hearing him translate Greek and Latin inscriptions of ancient date with the ease with which I put my ordinary thought into English. Together we visited the Farnese Palace, the Mamertine Prison, the Temple of Vesta, Santa Maria in Cosmedin and other churches too numerous and too pointless to mention. It was interesting to me to note the facility of his learning and the depth of his philosophy. In spite of the fact that life, in the light of his truly immense knowledge of history and his examination of human motives, seemed a hodge-podge of contrarieties and of ethical contradictions, nevertheless he believed that through all the false witness and pretense and subtlety of the ages, through the dominating and apparently guiding impulses of lust and appetite and vanity, seemingly untrammeled by mercy, tenderness or any human consideration, there still runs a constructive, amplifying, art-enlarging, life-developing tendency which is comforting, dignifying, and purifying, making for larger and happier days for each and all. It did not matter to him that the spectacle as we read it historically is always one of the strong dominating the weak, of the strong battling with the strong, of greed, hypocrisy and lying. Even so, the world was moving on--to what he could not say,--we were coming into an ethical understanding of things. The mass was becoming more intelligent and better treated. Opportunity, of all sorts, was being more widely diffused, even if grudgingly so. We would never again have a Nero or a Caligula he thought--not on this planet. He called my attention to that very interesting agreement between leading families of the Achæan League in lower Greece in which it was stipulated that the “ruling class should be honored like gods” and that the subject class should be “held in subservience like beasts.” He wanted to know if even a suspicion of such an attitude to-day would not cause turmoil. I tried out his philosophy by denying it, but he was firm. Life was better to him, not merely different as some might take it to be.