early learnt to recognise only the excellences of his teachers, their
patience and firmness, their benevolence and sweetness, their integrity
and virtue. Amid the frightful universality of moral corruption he
preserved a stainless conscience and a most pure soul; he thanked God in
language which breathes the most crystalline delicacy of sentiment and
language, that he had preserved uninjured the flower of his early life,
and that under the calm influences of his home in the country, and the
studies of philosophy, he had learnt to value chastity as the sacred
girdle of youth, to be retained and honoured to his latest years.
"Surely," says Mr. Carlyle, "a day is coming when it will be known again
what virtue is in purity and continence of life; how divine is the blush
of young human cheeks; how high, beneficent, sternly inexorable is the
duty laid on every creature in regard to these particulars. Well, if
such a day never come, then I perceive much else will never come.
Magnanimity and depth of insight will never come; heroic purity of
heart and of eye; noble pious valour to amend us and the age of bronze
and lacquers, how can they ever come? The scandalous bronze-lacquer age
of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotencies, and mendacities will have
to run its course till the pit swallow it."



CHAPTER II.

THE LIFE AND THOUGHTS OF MARCUS AURELIUS.

On the death of Hadrian in A. D. 138, Antoninus Pius succeeded to the
throne, and, in accordance with the late Emperor's conditions, adopted
Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Commodus. Marcus had been betrothed at the
age of fifteen to the sister of Lucius Commodus, but the new Emperor