“Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and ‘insight’ as conducting to that fulness—energy, variety, and choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life ... whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the ‘new Cyrenaicism’ of Marius took its criterion of values.” This would involve “a life of industry, of industrious study, only possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and soul.” Marius then, with his creed formulated, at nineteen years of age, sets out for Rome, where he has an old family mansion, to become the amanuensis of the Emperor. There is a beautiful description of his journey: how the sun went down “though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of an old temple.” On the journey he meets the young Christian knight, Cornelius. And it must be here confessed that the youthful soldier of the Imperial guard, with his gilded armour, his blithe manliness, his sense of secret serenity, is one of the least convincing figures of the book. To put it in the plainest way possible, there is an indefinable taint of priggishness about Cornelius, and Pater in vain labours to create a charm about him. To weave such a charm the elaborate narrative style is inadequate; one gets no glimpse into the blithe and serene mind of Cornelius; he is “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null”—no touch of humanity ever comes to relieve his statuesque pose, and one wearies of his golden armour and his handsome face. Nothing but dramatic art, such as the art of Scott, could have given Cornelius attractiveness; and even he would have been baffled by the sober perfection of the young knight. One longs that he should lose his temper, make some human mistake, exhibit some trace of emotion or even frailty; but he takes instead his icy shining way through the story, and the heart never desires to follow him.