Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power;
Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,
In various habits, on the Appian road,
Or on the Æmilian”—
But still his questions came. How did the ships come up and unlade again? What were the army and the navy like? Had I seen the famous men? Were the people noble as became a metropolitan race? Achilles questioning Ulysses in Hades could not have spoken more magnificently than this old man questioning me, though I seemed the ghost and he the visitor to the underworld. Yet in some sort his great questions, elevating his soul, seemed to supply him, if not with an answer, at least with some satisfaction. I would have spoken, if I could. But how short the evening! myself how unprepared and inadequate! I would have told him of Pimlico and Battersea which were not entirely unknown to me. I would have said that there were sorrowful and happy men there—thousands of both, unknown to me and unknown to one another; thousands of houses, beautiful, stately, pompous, indifferent, ugly, sublimely squalid; that upon them as upon him and his neighbours fell rain and sun and snow and the wind beat and death came suddenly, desired or undesired; that the city was as vast as Time, which had made it, and that to know it a man must live and die the lives and deaths of all that had ever lived and died there. But he ceased to regard me. He entered into talk with others that came in. One sang this ballad and he, like the rest, joined the chorus:—
“My clothing was once of the linsey woolsey fine,
My tail it grew at length, my coat likewise did shine;
But now I’m growing old, my beauty does decay,
My master frowns upon me; one day I heard him say—