have passed becomes the destroying pestilence of the age at which we have arrived, when the conquering race must be ranked amongst the conquered nations of the heathen world. The dominion of Augustus, a man so feeble in himself, over subjects who were already prostrate was not the beginning of a new life, but the close of the old life that had ebbed away with the liberty of Rome.

ence.

62

The Emperor himself appears to have feared, from first to last, the resurrection of the ancient independHe lived in continual parade of humility, that could have deceived none who did not choose to be deceived; nor from the time when he rejected the laws of the triumvirate, as if he were glad to be released from them, down to the adoption of a successor whom he hated, did there seem to be a stone unturned which could serve, small though it were, for a monument to all succeeding generations of the weakness of the sovereign who looked so mighty. His consummate prudence, his patient self-control, and the affability he affected towards all classes but his soldiers, were the qualities he appeared to possess; but when once the veil is fallen, he stands shivering with superstition 63 and corrupt with profligacy,64 crying, one day, for a slaughtered army, infuriated, another, by the shame of his only child, and governed always by his wife Livia more strictly than he could rule the world.

61 Suet., Aug., 72 et seq.

62 Dion Cass., LIII. 2.

63 Suet., Aug., 90 et seq.

65

Behold him in the Forum

64 Ibid., 71.

65 Ibid., 22.

66 Dion Cass., LV. 10.

or the Senate; and though he be composed and graceful, that anxious eye, those guarded words, betray him ill at ease. An actor, guilty of some disturbance, tells Augustus that it is well for the people to have other men to watch besides their Emperor; and he is pardoned.67 A frantic citizen runs through the streets screaming that he has sworn not to survive Augustus, and that others must swear the same; and he is rewarded.69 If the Emperor has to harangue the Senate or publish an edict, he will quote "whole books" upon his side, as if to convince the people, says his biographer, that his opinions had been held of old.69 How wretched the subjects of such a sovereign! but how much more wretched—and God be praised that such judgments of His are always visible the sovereign of such subjects as were then called Romans!

Neither the family misfortunes that came upon Augustus the Emperor, as if in retribution of his early crimes and his subsequent hypocrisies, nor the public events, campaigns, and yearly intrigues of his reign, belong to the history of liberty, scarcely to that of servitude. He outlived the friends and the children to whom he would have most willingly surrendered his authority at the hour of death. His last words were to ask if he had played his part becomingly;70 as if the forty-four years of his dominion and

the seventy-seven of life were worthy of applause on account of the length to which they had been protracted beyond the terror and the humiliation they had wrought amongst his fellow-creatures. He was made a god by those who survived him; and his step-son, in whom there were none of his virtues, but only his vices magnified," succeeded to his throne. The gradation in character from that of the first Cæsar to that of Augustus, the second, and then to this of Tiberius, the third, is the progress of the despotism which triumphed where liberty had been overthrown.72

71 Dion Cassius, after describing Tiberius, mentions that some suspected Augustus of having chosen him to serve as a foil to his memory! LVI. 45. Cf. Tac., Ann., I. 10.

72" But," as Jeremy Taylor says, with sublime fervor, "what

soever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious men is not so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and unregarded upon the pavement and floor of heaven." Holy Dying, Ch. I. sect. 4.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CLOSE OF ANTIQUITY.

"Presso al tempo che tutto 'l Ciel volle

Ridur lo mondo a suo modo sereno."

DANTE, Paradiso, VI. 55, 56.

"Thus is our Era to be named of Hope."- CARLYLE, French Revolution, Book III. ch. 8.

THE view from which our steps are bearing us away is such as we may well be glad to leave. A few scattered palaces, wherein we would not willingly look again, rise amongst a mass of hovels, of which the doors are closed against us, upon a plain grim with devastation and sterility. The cheerful voice of the husbandman is changed to the outcry of the soldier or the wail of the slave; while the earth itself, as if saddened and speechless, denies a place to the waving corn, and bears, it seems, no tree or leaf to hear the murmurs of the wind. Above the plain, a mountain, diademed with clouds, and barren as the fields beneath, supports a single edifice, which, whether it be a residence or a fortress, is equally magnificent and dreary. Here dwells the master, and below him, on the plain, are the subjects of the Roman Empire.

The prospect to which we turn, at first, is not more gladsome. Without a people, and, a few rare

instances excepted, without a ruler that deserves the name, the Empire appears to sink deeper and deeper in the wickedness and feebleness it has inherited. Years pass, and centuries; and as they one by one depart from Rome, her fortitude and hope are not only extinguished, but forgotten. The despotism of the Emperor is the judgment upon the Empire. The hollowness of the Empire, like "an empty urn," becomes fit for the "withered hands" of the Emperor by whom it is held. And the onslaught of the barbarians, at last, is the retribution to which the Emperor, the Empire, and the parent Commonwealth have been long foredoomed. The glimpses before or behind us, that we catch of Rome alone, are all alike mournful.

In every country and amongst every nation of the ancient world, a marvellous progress from barbarism to comparative civilization or from servitude to comparative freedom had been allowed to precede the decline to each appointed in its turn. The extent of this advancement was generally commensurate with the degree of liberty existing amongst the various races engaged in its production; and the greatest development of knowledge and of cultivation occurred in Greece, together with the greatest development of liberty. A different phase appears to be observable in Rome, under whose laws liberty attained to a greater stature than in any other heathen state, without producing a corresponding increase in the sciences, the arts, or the comforts of mankind. The same religion that had interposed itself like a cloud between the