Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/70

58 riot beyond all the bounds of good taste and sober thinking. We are all amused, and so we should be, if we lived in a street where those slaves of the lamp had the power of rendering the walls so transparent that we could see everything going on at our neighbours' firesides. But ought we to be so pleased?" Aye, gentlemen tourists, pencillers by the way, domestic police reporters, household inventory-takers, and breakfast-table shorthand-writers, all the sort of you,—aye, there's the rub. Good Mrs. Grant would perhaps have changed her mild interrogative into a very decisive affirmative, or rather a very indignant negative, had she lived to see what we see, and hear what we hear, in these times of gossiping fireside inquisitors.

From "Peter's Letters" to "Valerius" is an abrupt transition. In this classical novel we are made spectators of a series of tableaux, illustrative of the manners and events of Rome under Trajan. Thus the narrator takes us to patrician reception-rooms; to the Forum—with its grand associations and familiar traditions—the ancient rostrum from which Tully had declaimed, and the old mysterious fig-tree of Romulus, and the rich tesselated pavement, memorial of the abyss that had once yawned before the steady eye of Curtius; to senatorial gardens, with their garniture of fountains and exotics and perfumed terraces and sculptured nymphs and fauns; to a supper-party in the Suburra; to a praetorian guard-room, and a prison for doomed Christians; to the Flavian Amphitheatre, to hear the gladiator's moriturus vos saluto, and the confessor's dying credo; to the temple of Apollo, shrine of the reliquary Sybilline prophecies, and museum of the busts of earth's immortals; to a Veronese painter's studio; to a Neapolitan witch's midnight enchantments; to a village barber's shop, full of custom and fuss and small-talk; to a secret congress of the faithful in the catacombs; to Trajan's presence-chamber, and the Mammertine dungeons. The characters engaged in the action present a fair diversity of types of society in the capital, but for the most part lacking individuality and life. Valerius himself is too much of the faultless walking gentleman, though his betrothed, the high- hearted and deep-hearted Athanasia, is some removes beyond the standard walking lady. Sabinus, the jovial, kindly, bustling centurion—with his strong muscular fabric and hearty masculine laugh,—who, under Agricola and his real triumphs, and Domitian and his sham one, has undergone varied freaks of fortune, and preserved his equanimity and his rubicundity unaltered in them all; Xerophrastes, the professed Stoic and eventual cynic, greedy, selfish, mercenary, and mischievous; and Dromo, the Cretan slave, "a leering varlet, with rings in his ears, whose face resembled some comic mask in the habitual archness of its malicious and inquisitive look;" these are perhaps the most noticeable of the dramatis personæ, though themselves subordinate agents. There is a scattering of philosophers, who discourse learnedly on their conflicting systems—the Epicurean in particular being set forth and incidentally exemplified in a prominent degree. Among the more remarkable passages in the action of the tale may be noted, the scene in the guard-room, where, after the boisterous choruses of a boon soldiery, Valerius overhears "the voices of those that were in the dungeon singing together in a sweet and lowly