These, however, were mere fopperies or pardonable extravagancies in
one so young and so exalted; "quae, etsi non decora," as the historian
observes, "non tamen ad perniciem publicam prompta sunt." A graver mode of
licentiousness appeared in his connections with women. He made no secret
of his lawless amours; and to his own wife, on her expostulating with him
on his aberrations in this respect, he replied--that "_wife_" was a
designation of rank and official dignity, not of tenderness and affection,
or implying any claim of love on either side; upon which distinction he
begged that she would mind her own affairs, and leave him to pursue such
as he might himself be involved in by his sensibility to female charms.
However, he and all his errors, his "regal beauty," his princely pomps,
and his authorized hopes, were suddenly swallowed up by the inexorable
grave; and he would have passed away like an exhalation, and leaving no
remembrance of himself more durable than his own beds of rose-leaves, and
his reticulated canopies of lilies, had it not been that Hadrian filled
the world with images of his perfect fawn-like beauty in the shape of
colossal statues, and raised temples even to his memory in various cities.
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