Now, Pomponius Cotta (I give him that name because it is a sounding one--not that I know his real denomination) was a noble Roman. He was one of the actors in that drama which Mr. Gibbon of London and Lausanne so elegantly described some centuries afterwards: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It must have been a strange time, that Decline and Fall. Reflecting upon the gigantic, overgrown, diseased civilisation of the wonderful empire, surrounded and preyed upon by savage and barbarous Goths and Visigoths, Vandals, Dacians, and Pannonians, I cannot help picturing to myself some superannuated old noble, accomplished, luxurious, diseased and depraved--learned in bon-mots and scandalous histories of a former age, uselessly wealthy, corruptly cultivated, obsoletely magnificent, full of memories of a splendid but infamous life, too old to reform, too callous to repent, cynically presaging a deluge after him, yet trembling lest that deluge should come while he was yet upon the stage, and wash his death-bed with bitter waters; who is the sport and mock, the unwilling companion and victim unable to help himself, of a throng of rough, brutal, unpolished youngsters--hobbedehoys of the new generation--who carouse at his expense, smoke tobacco under his nose, borrow his money, slap him on the back, and call him old fogey behind it, sneer at his worn-out stories, tread on his gouty toes, ridicule his obsolete politeness, and tie crackers to the back of his coat collar. Have you not seen the decline and fall of the human empire? So men and empires have alike their decadence. But Pomponius Cotta never recked, it is very probable, of such things. He might have occasionally expressed his belief, like some noble Romans of our own age and empire, that the country was going to the bad; but he had large revenues, which he spent in a right noble and Roman manner; and he laid whatever ugly misgivings he had in a red sea of Falernian and Chiajian (if, indeed, all the stock of those celebrated brands had not already been drunk out by the thirsty Visigoths and Vandals). He had the finest house in Genoa; and you who know what glorious palaces the city of the Dorias and the Spinolas can yet boast of, even in these degenerate days, may form an idea of what marvels of marble, statuary, frescos, and mosaics owned Pomponius Cotta for lord, in the days when there was yet a Parthenon at Athens and a Capitol at Rome.