“Oh no; I have just glanced at him:  for my own reading, I can admit none who does not write in the first instance for scholars, and then to the scholarly instincts in readers generally.  Here is Walter Pater.  We have his Renaissance; studies in art and poetry—­I gave it myself to the library.  We were so sorry we could not include that most beautiful book, ‘Marius the Epicurean.’  We have some young men here of twenty and three and twenty, and it would be delightful to see them reading it, so exquisite is its hopeful idealism; but we were obliged to bar it on account of the story of Psyche, sweetly though it be told, and sweetly though it be removed from any taint of realistic suggestion.  Do you know the book?”

“I can’t say I do.”

“Then read it at once.  It is a breath of delicious fragrance blown back to us from the antique world; nothing is lost or faded, the bloom of that glad bright world is upon every page; the wide temples, the lustral water—­the youths apportioned out for divine service, and already happy with a sense of dedication, the altars gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of flowers, the colour of the open air, with the scent of the beanfields, mingling with the cloud of incense.”

“But I thought you denied any value to the external world, that the spirit alone was worth considering.”

“The antique world knew how to idealise, and if they delighted in the outward form, they did not leave it gross and vile as we do when we touch it; they raised it, they invested it with a sense of aloofness that we know not of.  Flesh or spirit, idealise one or both, and I will accept them.  But you do not know the book.  You must read it.  Never did I read with such rapture of being, of growing to spiritual birth.  It seemed to me that for the first time I was made known to myself; for the first time the false veil of my grosser nature was withdrawn, and I looked into the true ethereal eyes, pale as wan water and sunset skies, of my higher self.  Marius was to me an awakening; the rapture of knowledge came upon me that even our temporal life might be beautiful; that, in a word, it was possible to somehow come to terms with life....  You must read it.  For instance, can anyone conceive anything more perfectly beautiful than the death of Flavian, and all that youthful companionship, and Marius’ admiration for his friend’s poetry?... that delightful language of the third century—­a new Latin, a season of dependency, an Indian summer full of strange and varied cadences, so different from the monotonous sing-song of the Augustan age; the school of which Fronto was the head.  Indeed, it was Pater’s book that first suggested to me the idea of the book I am writing.  But perhaps you do not know I am writing a book....  Did my mother tell you anything about it?”

“Yes; she told me you were writing the history of Christian Latin.”

“Yes; that is to say, of the language that was the literary, the scientific, and the theological language of Europe for more than a thousand years.”