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Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill," Casanova's Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius Petronius, and II Samuel.
The emperors built magnificent bath-houses, which included gymnasia, and sometimes libraries. What is now called the Turkish bath was very much in vogue. Dinner, or the cena, the principal meal, was about midway between noon and sunset. The fork was not used at the table, but only in carving; but spoons, and sometimes, it would appear, knives, were used by the host and his guests.
Cicero, in his prosecution of Verres, had shown up this aristocracy in all its brutality and greed, it remained for the author of the Cena to hold its absurdity up to the light of day, to lash an extravagance which, though utterly unbridled, was yet unable to exhaust the looted accumulations of years of political double dealing and malfeasance in office.
The following day at the appointed hour I waited on him, told him I was the real culprit, secured the colonel's release, paid a fine of a few dollars, and by nine o'clock was back again in my hotel; and when I sat down with the Colonel that night to a special cena to which I had invited him intending in some measure to prove to him my gratitude for his generosity and esteem I made a rather boyish speech in which I regretted tremendously the Colonel's having passed an exceedingly uncomfortable night in prison on my account, and my inability to release him the night before.
Leonardo is only to be seen in the 'Cena'; Titian only in the 'Assumption'; but Rubens only in the 'Battle of the Amazons'; and Vandyck only at court; and he adds, his indignation mounting as he proceeds, 'absolutely now at last we find ourselves without sight of God in all the world! In another place Mr. Ruskin's old enemy, Salvator, receives more lenient treatment than of yore.
MILAN, March 25th, 1859. I am once more on my travels without having told you anything about them; tired out as I am by the Brera, the "Cena", the Cathedral, etc., I do not want to go to bed before sending you two words of news. In order not to interrupt the composition of my third act, I came to the conclusion that I ought to begin it in a place where I might finish it.
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