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unlike the other in fashion and colour. Viewed from the right the same masker was a blooming youth, viewed from the left he was a chapfallen crone. One profile was that of Stephen the proto-martyr, the other was that of Sir Gawain's lothly bride. In the pages of Clarendon, Charles is a saint and a martyr; in the pages of May he is an Ezzelin or a Sforza. But however widely the English historians may diverge in their accounts of the same person, there is a decorum in their censure, and a limit to their praise, which enable us to detect, even in opposite portraitures, some common features of resemblance. At all events we possess both Clarendon and May, and we can strike the balance of contradictions according to our several predilections. Whereas in Roman history, in the first place, we have lost the counter-statement, and must profit, as well as we can, by the extant caricature. We have not a line of Sulla's memoirs, not a word of Hortensius's orations, nor a fragment from the history of Asinius Pollio, the surly Ludlow of the Roman rebellion. But this is not the only or the worst privation against which we have to contend. Livy assures us that Roman history was, from the earliest times, a tissue of misrepresentations. Nec facile est aut rem rei aut auctorem auctori præferre,' is the historian's complaint of his authorities for the Samnite war, and he more than once recurs to it. 'Vitiatam memoriam,' he proceeds, charging his informants with enormous lying,'' funebribus laudibus reor, falsisque imaginum titulis, dum familia ad se quæque famam rerum gestarum honorumque fallente 'mendacio trahunt.' And the disease had even deeper roots than heraldic vanity. Mr. Merivale has justly termed the Catilinarian and Jugurthine wars' of Sallust a series of pun'gent satires, under the garb of history.' Cicero, in the teeth of his own definition of the duty of an historian, earnestly implores his friend Lucceius to write a partial narrative of his memorable consulate. The licence of Roman lampoon may be inferred from the epigrams of Catullus and Martial; while the licence of the Roman bar and hustings transcends the experience, and almost the imagination, of modern times. Sir Edward Coke, in his prosecution of Raleigh,-Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, under the combined influence of rage and brandy,-a repealer at Conciliation Hall,—a farmer at a protectionist meeting, may afford the unlearned reader a faint and distant image of the virulence of Cicero's speeches against Catilina, Piso, and Antonius. The abuse doubtless brought with it its own remedy. The orator was hooted and applauded, but he was not believed. The cudgel and the dagger were in all eras of the commonwealth freely employed against obnoxious statesmen, but never, as far

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as we know, against the calumnious orator. Virulent abuse was in fact his stock in trade. It would have been deemed as unfair to deprive him of the right of peroration, as of the right of maligning an antagonist. But the licence permitted to the Roman pleader by his audience has been, from the inattention of scholars to these attendant circumstances, singularly injurious to the credibility of Roman history. The most atrocious libels, which excited only a smile at the time, have been gravely adopted as authentic testimonials to an evil reputation. Dirt of this kind sticks somewhere. The sceptical Middleton's faith in Cicero's calumnies is really ludicrous. To take one instance from among many; he believes that Marcus Antonius,-whose vigilance as Cæsar's lieutenant in Italy detected even a strange fishing boat in the harbour of Brundisium, - was drunk for three months together. And his grounds of belief for this notable fact rest on the credit of Cicero's second philippic. But the commentaries of Cæsar, the orations and letters of Cicero, and Sallust's 'pungent satires,' are our only contemporary documents for the Roman revolution. The few fragments preserved in Plutarch, Macrobius, Gellius, and the anecdotists, are not of sufficient importance to qualify the assertion. Of all these authorities, the rigid simplicity of the great Julian leader wears the most specious garb. We do not insist, however, on his veracity. Cicero's letters to Atticus certainly differ in many respects from his orations. But his mind had been so warped by his rhetorical education and practice, that we doubt, as Major O'Flaherty doubted of lawyers in general, whether he even spoke truth to himself.' The documents of the Roman revolution require therefore wary walking,' and Mr. Merivale has displayed a laudable scepticism in his employment of them.

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The two central figures in the opposite groups of Roman statesmen, during the revolutionary era, are Sulla and Cæsar; -each respectively the representatives of conflicting theories of government, but each equally possessed of organic ideas, and each equally unscrupulous in reducing them to practice. Yet there was an essential difference in their political genius. Combined, they were the Janus of the revolution. Sulla looked back with reverted gaze to the republic of Camillus and the decemvirs: Cæsar contemplated, with keener prescience and more comprehensive faith, the empire of Trajan and the Antonines. The elder dictator beheld what had been practicable in the past the younger what was possible for the future. Sulla seems, like Kobespierre, to have believed that by extirpating his opponents he could perpetuate the formularies of a theoretical constitution: Cæsar, like Napoleon, regarded himself

'the man of destiny' appointed to remodel and renovate the world. The one discarded all that was not merely Roman from his plan the other adopted and engrafted into his system all the vitality that lingered in ancient civilisation, and all the promise that manifested itself in Transalpine barbarism. The work of the one crumbled away in a single generation: the structure of the other still modifies the feelings and institutions of the most civilised portions of mankind. The policy of amalgamation, both as regarded its results and its representative, was stronger than the policy of isolation. There was a strange sympathy between these mighty opposites.' Sulla, who in his fanatical zeal for reaction, had never before spared any man, however obscure or incapable, spared the young trifler,' whose genius he detected, although he could not discern the full scope and dimensions of his career. And Cæsar, who became afterwards all things to all men,' discarded all dissimulation in the Dictator's presence, and stood erect and inflexible, when even Pompeius quailed. Sulla's genius was rebuked before 'Cæsar's.'

The apparent strongholds of reaction were in the senate and the legions. Its real weakness was manifested in every quarter of the empire, as soon as death had loosened the iron grasp of its author. The senate, indeed, with the army for its bodyguard and the veterans and freedmen of Sulla for its outposts, -easily resisted the crude and feeble attempts of the consul Lepidus to rescind the Cornelian constitution. But on every side of Italy, and within the heart of the peninsula itself, was heaped up the fuel of revolution. Sertorius and the Marian refugees had wrested nearly the whole of Spain from the armies of the republic. Mithridates once more swept the plains of Lesser Asia with his Pontic and Armenian cavalry and the innumerable bays and creeks of the Cilician coast poured forth their terrible banditti, who, like the northern Vikings of a later age, neither sowed nor reaped themselves, but filled their garners from the harvests of Sicily and Africa. Even the Appian road itself, the great artery of metropolitan Rome, echoed to the tramp of these marauders. Even the Mediterranean, which the arrogant eloquence of the forum had denominated the Lake of Rome,'-as far north as the Ligurian Gulf, and as far west as Gades, swarmed with their cruisers. It was a point of honour with these freebooters to parade their defiance of Rome by murdering the officers of the State as often as they captured them. But the magistrates of the republic were not alone their victims. The dungeons of Cilicia were thronged with Roman citizens; whole fleets of merchant vessels, with their passengers and

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cargoes, fell into their hands; the towns and villas of the mainland and of the islands were ransacked by their foragers; and to their secular pillage they added the sacred hoards of the principal temples, where the piety or prudence of the Grecian world had, from the era of the Heracleids, deposited its votive or personal wealth.

And contemporaneous with this anarchy without, a deeper woe and nemesis were preying upon Italy itself. Gladiatorial exhibitions had already begun to form the great national diversions of the Romans and Italians. They were on a less extensive scale, they were perhaps, on the whole, less sanguinary, - than they afterwards became, when senators and even emperors fought in the arena; but they already contributed, with foreign and with civil war, to harden and contaminate the spectators. The embers of a general servile war were still smouldering in Sicily, when the flames of a similar but more formidable insurrection broke out at Capua. For the career of Spartacus we must refer to Mr. Merivale's pages. The military genius of the Thracian shepherd is attested by the fact, that he was not reduced until he had ravaged the peninsula, from the Sicilian Straits to the frontiers of Cisalpine Gaul, nor until three regular armies were concentrated at once upon his predatory bands. Pompeius and Crassus both contended for the honour of suppressing a servile revolt; and at one time it was proposed to recall Lucullus from the East, and to precipitate the whole force of the empire upon a band of Thracian and Gaulish fencers.

An empire which endured and survived so many shocks, and which attained, in the course of another generation, powers more ample and secure than even the conquerors of Carthage and Macedon had won and bequeathed, must have contained in its heart of hearts no ordinary vital force: And the weakness exhibited by Rome in the latter half of its seventh century, arose not so much after all from the decay of the subject-population, as from the decrepitude of the central government. The statesman or warrior who should relieve the provinces and resources of the commonwealth from the pressure of the oligarchy, and by throwing open the barriers of the constitution infuse new vigour into the body politic,-would solve the problem which the Gracchi had been murdered for proposing, and which Sulla fondly thought he had superseded altogether.

The following sketch of the ordinary texture of the senatorian party serves to show that the restorer of the State could not be expected to come from their ranks :

The conviction of the miserable inefficiency of many of the prin

cipal nobles was forced upon Cicero; nor could he be insensible of the danger their cause incurred, when they professed to put themselves under the guidance of a leader such as Cato, whose ways and views were so alien from their own, and whose disposition was so untractable. As to Cato himself, we may imagine the perplexity with which he must have regarded the several sections of the party among whom he occupied so conspicuous a place. He had to choose his counsellors and instruments either among the elder men, who were indolent and immovable in action, insensible to public morality, even to the contempt of outward decency; or among the younger, who were violent, on the other hand, and reckless, their hot patrician blood inflamed no less by luxury than pride. The early years of the former class had been mostly passed in camps. The urgent dangers of the republic had allowed them little leisure, even at home, to cultivate the refinements of social life. At a later period, crowned with success, and with all the enjoyments of wealth suddenly placed at their feet, they plunged, from mere ignorance, into a tasteless imitation of the sensual civilisation of the East. The pictures of vice which the writers of the age have left us are principally taken from the highest aristocracy; and the habits of a Piso and a Gabinius leave no doubt of the barbarian coarseness of the class to which they belonged.'

Even the better and more refined members of the aristocracy were incompetent to the task of government, and blind, either from prejudice or indolence, to the pressing demands of the time. At an earlier and happier period, indeed, Greek cultivation had produced a genuine and salutary effect upon the Roman character; and Scipio and Flamininus, with their illustrious coevals of the Fabian and Emilian houses, were worthy recipients of the political maxims of Polybius and the philosophical doctrines of Panetius. But the destiny of the race of conquerors prevailed. Each succeeding generation became more deeply immersed in war than its predecessors; and the habits of the camp silenced or perverted the lessons of the schools.

Even those individuals,' Mr. Merivale proceeds, who were most celebrated for their love of polite literature had but little of that genuine devotion to it which courts enjoyment and rejoices in simplicity. The purity even of Cicero's taste may be called in question, though he was far removed from the voluptuous refinements which enervate the mind and vitiate morality. But Lucullus and the accomplished orator, Hortensius, second only to Cicero among his contemporaries, a scholar and a wit, no less than a pleader and debater, did more to degrade than to exalt the tastes which they affected to patronise. The display which Lucullus made of his libraries and galleries of art, throwing them open to public admiration, however much in advance of the real wants of the age, and calculated to create envy rather than gratitude, might yet be represented as a more magnanimous use of his wealth than the vulgar profusion by which others