good things; among these were a number of apples from Uncle John's favourite tree, but which, he declared, were not half so red as the rosy cheeks little Lena would take home to her father.

A LITTLE CHILD AT PRAYER. I saw a little child kneel down to pray, And these were the words I heard it say:

"Lord, hear the prayer of a little child, Who by nature's sinful, rude and wild, Make me gentle, pure and mild.

"Guard my footsteps all the day; Teach me to tread the heavenly way; And when at night I seek my bed, May angels sweet their vigils keep Around my head!"

THE SAYINGS OF LABIENUS: ON THE LIFE OF CESAR BY NAPOLEON III. By M. Rogeard.-[Of all the literary criticisms which have budded under the sun of the French empire, none has attained the height of the Sayings of Labienus (Les Propos de Labienus). Mr. Rogeard has transported into the French language the elegance of Cicero and the conciseness of Tacitus; he has, nevertheless, been very wrong in adding one more demonstration to that truth so often proved, that the height of intellect and talent are not measurable by the height of the several positions of an author. He has humiliated his imperial antagonist, and should have expected what has happened to him. Why" discuss with him who has thirty legions? In a country which is not free, one should avoid meddling with contemporaneous history; and criticism as to such matters is impossible." Poor Mr. Rogeard has experienced the extreme justice of his previsions; having been condemned to prison and to several bundreds of francs fine, for possessing more mind and talent than his sovereign. I hope that the free public will absolve him and read his work, as the finest specimen of literary criticism which France has produced for years.-TRANS.]

What follows took place in the year VII., after J. C., the thirty-first year of the reign of Augustus, seven years before his death. The principality had full sway, the people had a master. Slowly escaping from that vapour of blood which had reddened its rising, the star of Julius at length cast a soft light upon the silent forum. It was a fine moment! The wards were quiet, and laws were mute; no more ward comitia, or assemblies of hundreds, took place, no more rogations, no more provocations, no more secessions, no more plesbiscitum, no more elections, no more disorder; there was no republican army any longer, nulla publica arma. Roman peace was everywhere, gained by the Romans: a single tribune reigned-Augustus; a single army stood-the army of Augustus; a single will prevailed-his; there was a single

consul-himself; a single censor-himself also; a single prætor-himself; he was everywhere (1). Proscribed eloquence died away under the shadows of the schools; literature expired under the protection of Mæcenus (2). Titus Livius ceased to write; Labeon ceased to speak; Cicero's readings were forbidden; society was saved (3). As for glory. that was abundant, as it should be in an empire which respects itself; there had been fighting about in all directions; the people of the north and south, on the right and on the left, had received an all-sufficient whipping; there were plenty of names to post up at the corners of streets, and on the triumphal arches; there were vanquished nations to be chained in basso relievo; there were the Dalmatians, the Cantabrians, and the Aquitanians, and the Pannonians; the Illyrians, the Rhætians, the Vindelisians, the Salassians, and the Dacians, the Ubians, the Sicambrians, and the Parthians, whom Cæsar dreamed of conquering; without counting the Romans of the civil wars, over whom Augustus had had the audacity to triumph, but on horseback only, through modesty. The emperor had even led the command in one of these wars, and been wounded (4), which is the height of glory for a great nation.

Nevertheless, sesterces rained down upon the tions. You would have said it cost him plebeians; the prince multiplied his distribunothing. He distributed all the time, and everywhere. He was so kind that he even gave to

to kill oneself about? The Senate did not wish the death of the guilty man, but merely to give him a warning; it was needful to profit by it; but this man took everything in the wrong way, and always heard a thing backwards, when he heard it at all. He was well worthy of figuring in the long file of stoic suicides which had begun to form, and among all those heroic simpletons, those absolute and systematic opposers, insane and absurd, who made their very death an act of opposition, and imagined that, by opening their veins, they played the emperor a trick. Some even killed themselves solely to spite the prince, who laughed under his moustache, and was all the more convinced of the excellence of his policy, when he saw his work doing itself. Labienus was a man of this kind; you see he was an idiot; such was the man whose Sayings we wish to tell you, and you will see in those sayings, as in his life and death, that he was always the same, that is to say, incorrigible. He was a man of the old party, since the republic had gone by; a reactionary, since the republic was a thing of the past; one of the old régime, since the government of laws was the former régime; in a word, he was an old fogy (22). He was one of those quarrelsome men who must tremble under a strong government, in order that peaceable men should be secure, and that society, shaken to its foundation, should be able to rest again upon its basis. This is not all: Labienus was ungrateful. In the very midst of Cæsarism, in the full tide of glory, amid that over-abundance of felicity and that vast festival of humankind he ignored the banefactions scattered with open hand by the second founder of Rome, the peace-maker of the world. He cherished, at the same time, the inimical passions and blind folly which make dangerous men and bad citizens. But you do not know him. His passion wanted air and space in the suffocation of the principality. Being able no longer to speak, write, act or move, he passed whole hours upon the Sublicius bridge, looking at the flow of the Tiber, motionless and mute, but with flashing eyes and threatening gesture, his bosom swelling with the spirit of former days; like a statue of Mars the avenger, like a petrified tribune. "It is sweet to sleep," said Michael Angelo, or to be of stone, so long as shame and misery endure." Labienus did not sleep, but he was of stone, harder than the rock of the capitol (immobile saxum). Tyranny had no hold upon him, the empire could not clutch at him; he was a Roman of the old rock, which nothing could break. Alone, standing, like Cocles, between an army and a precipice, he defied both; he defied Augustus and smiled upon death. In all this there was something good, if you will; but, at the same time, what a detestable disposition! what a surly turn of mind! Octavius in vain struck off a superb medal, with the three interlaced hands of the triumvirate and this

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(2). Napoleon's words after the coup d'êtât.

sublime inscription: "The salvation of humanity." Even this displeased him; he asserted that he had been saved in spite of himself, and he quoted the line of Horace: "When thus to be preserved is not my wish or will, The saviour an assassin is, who thus preserves me still."

The old Labienus was one of those who had seen the republic; he had the folly to remember it; there lay the evil. He now saw a great reign, and he was not satisfied. There are people who never are so. He always thought himself on the day after Pharsalia; forty years of glory put his eyes out with their lustre, but without opening them; he looked like a man in a bad dream, and reality was only an infernal vision to him. He was a simpleton in his astonish. ment; he would not believe what had happened. Epimenides (who slept a hundred years*), when he awoke, was less astonished. Sad in the midst of universal joy, sombre at the Roman orgie, like the two philosophers in Couture's picture, he was there and seemed to live elsewhere: he was a death's-head at the feast. You might have thought him a corpse escaped from the tombs at Philippi, an inquisitive spectre who had come to look on. Sometimes a friend pitied him; he pitied his friend. Most often, all alone, he growled in his own corner: he looked at the empire passing. It was not possible to make such a man listen to reason. He belonged to another age, and was an exile in the new one; he had the home-sickness of the past; he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing; he comprehended nothing in the present epoch; he had all the prejudices of Brutus; he was infested with Greek opinions which bad not been fashionable in Rome for some time past. He looked as old as the Twelve Tables; he still thought as people thought in the time of Fabricius and the long-haired Camillus. And what fantastic ideas and incredible manias; especiaily one very singular, inexplicable taste: he loved liberty! It is clear that T. Labienus had not common sense. To love liberty! Do you understand that? It was a retrograde opinion, since liberty was a thing of old. The new men loved the new régime. He did not understand nicety of shades, nor had he the idea of time, or the comprehension of transition. Time had gone on, ideas also; he remained as firmly planted as a goal: he still believed in justice, in the law, in science and in conscience; he was clearly in his dotage. He talked of the party of honest men, like Cicero; he talked of the senate, of tribunes, of the comitia, and did not see that all these had melted away, like snow, into an immense sink, and that he was almost alone upon the outside. He still counted years by the consuls; for Augustus had left the name, in order that the thing might be believed in, and he hoped to resuscitate the thing by preserving the name. He prepared discourses to the people, as if there was a people; he in

* The classic Epimenides scarcely slept so long; his trance endured fifty-seven years.-ED.

voked laws as if there were laws. The principality to him was but a parenthesis in history, a shameful page in the annals of Rome. He would have made haste to turn the leaf over or tear it out he always said that it would end, and he thought so. People thought him mad, and he was so, as you see. As for everything else, he was a good sort of man, incapable of hurting a fly, or wishing the least harm to any one, unless it was Augustus, and hardly that. He was so mild, that he was merely for sending him to the galleys, to work the treadmill, contrary to the more prevalent opinion of those who would have had him crucified. He thought besides, with the stoics, that punishment is good for the guilty; it is therefore true to say that he wished Augustus the only happiness that could be his expiation. One day he was walking under Agrippa's portico, and met Gallionus (23). Junius Gallionus was a young sage, even as Labienus was an old madman. He was a mild, serious young man, learned and elegant, polite, circumspect, and prudent, a moderate stoic; Spanish and Roman at once, a citizen and a subject, a man of two epochs and two countries, with mixed blood and piebald opinions, a little this and a little that; sometimes, like Horace, turning his saddened glances towards the tomb of liberty, and letting them fall again, no less sad, upon the cradle of the empire; giving a tear to Cato, a smile to Cæsar: with a benevolent disposition, liking everybody a little, even Labienus. He was Seneca's brother, who had not dared to live, and uncle to Lucanus, who knew not how to die. There were no longer any but half-way heroes, and stumps of grandeur; a nation in ruins before its temples were built; here and there were still some half Romans. Gallionus made verses for the favourite Mæcenus; the critics called him the ingenious Gallionus. In fine, he must have had talent, for he was a proconsul. It was after him that those who were indifferent in religious matters were called Gallionists: he might have been somewhat of a patron in the same way, in political matters. This is what Labienus accused him of. I think the sombre promenader was about passing him by, without caring to recognize him, for Labienus wss not amiable; he was not any more affable than those famous senators who, proudly seated in the forum one day, received the Gauls so haughtily; indeed, Gallionus would not have ventured to stroke his beard but the young man was so happy, so pleased, and had such urgent need to tell some one the great news he had just learned: he was so curious to see what effect it would have on Labienus, that he accosted hin.

"Good day, Titus! quid agis, dulcissime rerum, how do you do?"

"I am ill, if the empire is well." "Well! everyone knows that you are always in a bad humour; but I have news for you." "There is nothing that can be news to me if Augustus still reigns."

(23). Probably Edmond About, or Provost Paradol.

"You will not read these memoirs, then, dear Titus?"

"I shall read them: I shall read them, Gallionus, with tears of shame."

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And you will reply to them, criticise them, write an anti-Cæsar, as Cæsar has written an anti-Cato."

"No, Gallionus, I shall publish nothing on this subject. I do not discuss with him who has thirty legions. In a country which is not free, one should not allow oneself to touch upon contemporary history; and criticism, in such a case, is impossible."

"You do not wish to enlighten the public, then?"

"I do not wish to aid in deceiving them; for, in these times, on such subjects, nothing that appears can be good, nothing that is good can appear. I shall continue my secret history, the manuscript of which I shall send to Severius, in a safe place: I will save truth by exiling it."

"But it is promised that criticism is to be free; tyranny is to give literature a week's freedom."

"They can give but a false liberty, a liberty of December (24), that is to say, a carnival-like liberty, libertas decembris, as Horace says: I will not profit by it. I will not, by writing against the book, place myself between the vengeance of Octavius and the clemency of Augustus (25), without even having free choice. I will not, like Cinna, give the fellow a chance to play the magnanimous with me, and be dispatched, as it were, by a pardon. As for praising the book, I could only do so if it is good, in which case I should fear to be confounded with those who will praise it from other motives. It is then as impossible for me to praise as to blame. sides, the book is not good and could not be When a man is so guilty as to have made himself king, and so imbecile as to make himself a god, I think that he cannot have all the qualities requisite for writing history.

Be

"You know already that he has neither good sense, nor good faith: what then remains to him? He can neither know the truth, nor tell it, if he knew it; what does this sceptre-bearer meddle with, then? Why does he take it into

(24). An allusion to the coup d'état of the 2nd December, and to the promises of liberty as held out by Napoleon III. as the crowning of the edifice.

(25). An allusion to the words of Octavius, so foolishly glorified by history: Augustus no longer remembers the injuries done to Octavins."