With an intimate practical knowledge of manners, physiognomies, smiles, disguises, flatteries, and courtly tricks of every kind--a whole accomplished rhetoric of daily life--he applied them all to the promotion of humanity, and especially of men's family affection.
Through a long life of now eighty years, he had been, as it were, surrounded by the gracious and soothing air of his own eloquence--the fame, the echoes, of it--like warbling birds, or murmuring bees.
Setting forth in that fine medium the best ideas of matured pagan philosophy, he had become the favourite "director" of noble youth Yes! it was the one instance Marius, always eagerly on the look-out for such, had yet seen of [223] a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful, old age--an old age in which there seemed, to one who perhaps habitually over-valued the expression of youth, nothing to be regretted, nothing really lost, in what years had taken away.

The wise old man, whose blue eyes and fair skin were so delicate, uncontaminate and clear, would seem to have replaced carefully and consciously each natural trait of youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent grace of culture; and had the blitheness, the placid cheerfulness, as he had also the infirmity, the claim on stronger people, of a delightful child.

And yet he seemed to be but awaiting his exit from life--that moment with which the Stoics were almost as much preoccupied as the Christians, however differently--and set Marius pondering on the contrast between a placidity like this, at eighty years, and the sort of desperateness he was aware of in his own manner of entertaining that thought.

His infirmities nevertheless had been painful and long-continued, with losses of children, of pet grandchildren.

What with the crowd, and the wretched streets, it was a sign of affection which had cost him something, for the old man to leave his own house at all that day; and he was glad of the emperor's support, as he moved from place to place among the children he protests so often to have loved as his own.
For a strange piece of literary good fortune, at the beginning of the present century, has set [224] free the long-buried fragrance of this famous friendship of the old world, from below a valueless later manuscript, in a series of letters, wherein the two writers exchange, for the most part their evening thoughts, especially at family anniversaries, and with entire intimacy, on their children, on the art of speech, on all the various subtleties of the "science of images"-- rhetorical images--above all, of course, on sleep and matters of health.