Amply swathed about in the folds of a richly worked toga, after a manner now long since become obsolete with meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of about five-and-forty years of age, with prominent eyes--eyes, which although demurely downcast during this essentially religious ceremony, were by nature broadly and benignantly observant.

He was still, in the main, as we see him in the busts which represent his gracious and courtly youth, when Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus, after the name of his father, but Verissimus, for his candour of gaze, and the bland capacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair, clustering thickly as of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a trace of the trouble of his lips.

You saw the brow of one who, amid the blindness or perplexity of the people about him, understood all things clearly; the dilemma, to which his experience so far had brought him, between Chance with meek resignation, and a Providence with boundless possibilities and hope, being for him at least distinctly defined.
That outward serenity, which he valued so [191] highly as a point of manner or expression not unworthy the care of a public minister--outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward religious serenity it had been his constant purpose to maintain--was increased to-day by his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had been one of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in very deed divine to them.

Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time into an expression of fatigue and effort, of loneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been detected there by the more observant--as if the sagacious hint of one of his officers, "The soldiers can't understand you, they don't know Greek," were applicable always to his relationships with other people.

The nostrils and mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius noted in them, as in the hands, and in the spare body generally, what was new to his experience--something of asceticism, as we say, of a bodily gymnastic, by which, although it told pleasantly in the clear blue humours of the eye, the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit.