The empress Faustina he would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining affection, from becoming altogether what most people have believed her, and won in her (we must take him at his word in the "Thoughts," abundantly confirmed by letters, on both sides, in his correspondence with Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the more secure, perhaps, because misknown of others.

Was the secret of her actual blamelessness, after all, with him who has at least screened her name?
At all events, the one thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to himself.
No! The wise, who had made due observation on the trees of the garden, would not expect to gather grapes of thorns or fig-trees: and he was the vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law, again and again, after his kind, whatever use people might make of it.

Certainly, his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina was glad in it to-day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who stood at her knee holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of his birthday gifts.--"For my [221] part, unless I conceive my hurt to be such, I have no hurt at all,"-- boasts the would-be apathetic emperor:--"and how I care to conceive of the thing rests with me." Yet when his children fall sick or die, this pretence breaks down, and he is broken-hearted: and one of the charms of certain of his letters still extant, is his reference to those childish sicknesses.--"On my return to Lorium," he writes, "I found my little lady--domnulam meam--in a fever;" and again, in a letter to one of the most serious of men, "You will be glad to hear that our little one is better, and running about the room--parvolam nostram melius valere et intra cubiculum discurrere." The young Commodus had departed from the chamber, anxious to witness the exercises of certain gladiators, having a native taste for such company, inherited, according to popular rumour, from his true father--anxious also to escape from the too impressive company of the gravest and sweetest specimen of old age Marius had ever seen, the tutor of the imperial children, who had arrived to offer his birthday congratulations, and now, very familiarly and affectionately, made a part of the group, falling on the shoulders of the emperor, kissing the empress Faustina on the face, the little ones on the face and hands.
Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the "Orator," favourite teacher of the emperor's youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now the undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, [222] elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a good fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors or rhetoricians.

The gratitude of the emperor Aurelius, always generous to his teachers, arranging their very quarrels sometimes, for they were not always fair to one another, had helped him to a really great place in the world.

But his sumptuous appendages, including the villa and gardens of Maecenas, had been borne with an air perfectly becoming, by the professor of a philosophy which, even in its most accomplished and elegant phase, presupposed a gentle contempt for such things.