ONE:"This looks like business," Prout exclaimed. "The letter is not sealed. Anyway, it was written here with the pen on the mantelpiece and that penny bottle of ink; see how pale it is and what shabby paper, evidently a ha'porth purchased from some huckster's shop. Isn't that right, sir?""What, the Corner House victim? Is that really a fact?"
TWO:They were gambling in earnest, there were hundreds of pounds in notes and gold on the dull green cloth. A handsome youth, who was ruining himself and his estate as speedily as possible, sat easy and collected next to a young society lady, whose husband would have been shot rather than see her in such company. A pretty marchioness, the daughter of an American millionaire, was plunging greedily and losing as steadily. Countess Lalage smiled with perfect equanimity as she saw her own counters vanishing. She pushed over two small notes with a little sigh. She did not look as if they were the last she had in the world, but they were.For a long time the history of the Roman Empire was written by the descendants of its most deadly enemiesby Christian ecclesiastics or by scholars trained under their influence, and by the inheritors of the northern races who overran and destroyed it. The natural tendency of both classes was to paint the vices of the old society in the most glaring colours, that by so doing they might exhibit the virtues of its conquerors and the necessity of their mission in stronger relief. In this respect, their task was greatly facilitated by the character of the authorities from whom their information was principally derived. Horace and Petronius, Seneca and Juvenal, Tacitus and Suetonius, furnished them with pictures of depravity which it was impossible to exaggerate, which had even to be toned down before they could be reproduced in a modern language. No allowance was made for the influence of a rhetorical training in fostering the cultivation of effect at the expense of truth, nor for the influence of aristocratic prejudice in securing a ready acceptance for whatever tended to the discredit of a monarchical government. It was also forgotten that the court and society of Rome could give no idea of the life led in the rest of Italy and in the provinces. Moreover, the contrast continually instituted or implied by these historians was not between the ancient civilisation and the state of things which immediately succeeded it, nor yet between the society of a great capital as it was then, and as it was in the historians own time. The points selected for contrast were what was worst in Paganism and what is best in Christianity. The one was judged from the standpoint of courtiers and men of the world,197 embittered by disappointment and familiar with every form of depravity, the other was judged from the standpoint of experience acquired in a college quadrangle, a country parsonage, or a cathedral close. The modern writer knew little enough even about his own country, he knew next to nothing about what morality was in the Middle Ages, and nothing at all about what it still continues to be in modern Italy.
