it is no less likely that, while he despised all the follies of the vulgar, he had a few of his own. The barbarous and dissimu

AUGUSTINE.

that Cicero, who was one of the college of augurs, wrote a book for the sole purof turning auguries into ridicule; pose but they have likewise remarked that Ci-lating Louis XI. had a firm faith in the cero, at the end of his book says, that cross of St. Louis. Almost all princes, "superstition should be destroyed, but excepting such as have had time to read, not religion. For," he adds, "the beauty and read to advantage, are in some degree of the universe, and the order of the hea-infected with superstition. venly bodies, force us to acknowledge an eternal and powerful nature. We must maintain the religion which is joined with the knowledge of this nature, by utterly extirpating superstition; for it is a monster which pursues and presses us on every side. The meeting with a pretended diviner, a presage, an immolated victim, a bird, a Chaldean, an aruspice, a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder, an event accidently corresponding with what has been foretold to us, everything disturbs and makes us uneasy; sleep itself, which should make us forget all these pains and fears, serves but to redouble them by frightful images."

Cicero thought he was addressing only a few Romans; but he was speaking to all men and all ages.

AUGUSTINE, a native of Tagaste, is here to be considered, not as a bishop, a doctor, a father of the Church, but simply as a man. This is a question in physics, respecting the climate of Africa.

When a youth, Augustine was a great libertine, and the spirit was no less quick He says, that before he was twenty years old, he had learned arithmetic, geometry, and music, without a master.

in him than the flesh.

Does not this prove that, in Africa, which we now call Barbary, both minds and bodies advance to maturity more rapidly than amongst us?

These valuable advantages of St. Augustine, would lead one to believe that Most of the great men of Rome no more Empedocles was not altogether in the believed in auguries, than Alexander VI., wrong, when he regarded fire as the prinJulius II., and Leo X., believed in Our ciple of nature. It is assisted, but by Lady of Loretto and the blood of St. subordinate agents. It is like a king Januarius. However, Suetonius relates governing the actions of all his subjects, that Octavius, surnamed Augustus, was and sometimes inflaming the imaginations so weak, as to believe that a fish, which of his people rather too much. It is not leaped from the sea upon the shore at without reason that Syphax says to Juba, Actium, foreboded that he should gain in the Cato of Addison, that the sun which the battle. He adds, that having after- rolls its fiery car over African heads, wards met an ass-driver, he asked him places a deeper tinge upon the cheeks, the name of his ass; and the man having and a fiercer flame within their hearts. answered that his ass was named Nicho-That the dames of Zama are vastly supelas, which signifies conqueror of nations, he had no longer any doubts about the victory; and that he afterwards had brazen statues erected to the ass-driver, the ass, and the jumping fish. He further assures us, that these statues were placed in the Capitol.

It is very likely that this able tyrant laughed at the superstitions of the Romans, and that his ass, the driver, and the fish, were nothing more than a joke. But

rior to the pale beauties of the north :

The glowing dames of Zama's royal court
Have faces flushed with more exalted charms;
Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale unripened beauties of the north.

Where shall we find in Paris, Strasburgh, Ratisbon, or Vienna, young men who have learned arithmetic, the mathematics, and music, without assistance, and who have been fathers at fourteen ?

Doubtless it is no fable that Atlas, prince of Mauritania, called by the

tions, proves that he was no less a despiser of decency in his language than he was a barbarian in his conduct. This abominable epigram is one of the strongest testimonies to Augustus's infamous immorality. Sextus Pompeius also reproached him with shameful weaknesses

Creeks the son of heaven, was a cele-written after the horrors of the proscripbrated astronomer, and constructed a celestial sphere, such as the Chinese have had for so many ages. The ancients, who expressed everything in allegory, likened this prince to the mountain which bears his name, because it lifts its head above the clouds, which have been called the heavens by all mankind who have judged of things only from the testimony of their

eyes.

"Effeminatum infectatus est." Anthony, before the triumvirate, declared that Cæsar, great uncle to Augustus, had adopted him as his son, only because he had been subservient to his pleasures"adoptionem avunculi stupro meritum "

These Moors cultivated the sciences with success, and taught Spain and Italy for five centuries. Things are greatly altered. The country of Augustine is Lucius Cæsar charged him with the now but a den of pirates; while England, same crime; and even asserted that he Italy, Germany, and France, which were had been base enough to sell himself to involved in barbarism, are greater culti-Hirtius for a very considerable sum. He vators of the arts than ever the Arabians

was so shameless as to take the wife of a consul from her husband in the midst of a supper; he took her to a neighbouring closet, staid with her there for some time, and brought her back to table, without himself, the woman, or her husband blushing at all at the proceeding.

Our only object, then, in this article, is to show how changeable a scene this world is. Augustine, from a debauchee, becomes an orator and a philosopher; he puts himself forward in the world; he teaches rhetoric; he turns Manichean, We have also a letter from Anthony to and from Manicheism passes to Christi- Augustus, couched in these terms—“ Ita anity. He causes himself to be baptized, { valeas ut hanc epistolam cùm leges, non together with one of his bastards, named inieris Testullam, aut Terentillam, aut Deodatus; he becomes a bishop, and a Russillam, aut Salviam, aut omnes. Anne father of the Church. His system of refert ubi et in quam arrigas?" We are grace has been reverenced for eleven hun- afraid to translate this licentious letter. dred years, as an article of faith. At the end of eleven hundred years, some Jesuits find means to procure an anathema against Augustine's system, word for word, under the names of Jansenius, St. Cyril, Arnaud, and Quesnel. We ask if this revolution is not, in its kind, as great as that of Africa; and if there be anything permanent upon earth?

AUGUSTUS (OCTAVIUS).

The Morals of Augustus. MANNERS can be known only from facts, which facts must be incontestable. It is beyond a doubt that this man, so immoderately praised as the restorer of morals and of laws, was long one of the most infamous debauchees in the Roman commonwealth. His epigram on Fulvia,

Nothing is better known than the scandalous feast of five of the companions of his pleasures with five of the principal women of Rome. They were dressed up as gods and goddesses, and imitated all the immodesties invented in fable

Dum nova Divorum coenat adulteria.

And on the stage he was publicly designated by this famous line

Videsne ut cinaedus orbem digito temperet! Almost every Latin author that speaks of Ovid, asserts, that Augustus had the insolence to banish that Roman knight, who was a much better man than himself, merely because the other had surprised him in an incest with his own daughter Julia; and that he sent his daughter into exile only through jealousy. This is the

more likely, as Caligula published aloud that his mother was born from the incest of Augustus with Julia. So says Suetonius, in his life of Caligula.

We know that Augustus repudiated the mother of Julia the very day she was brought to bed of her, and on the same day took Livia from her husband when she was pregnant of Tiberius-another monster, who succeeded him. Such was the man to whom Horace said

Res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes,
Legibus emendes, &c.

belonging to the citizens of Mantua and Cremona, thus recompensing murder by depredation.

It is but too certain that the world was ravaged, from the Euphrates to the extremities of Spain, by this man without shame, without faith, honour, or probity, knavish, ungrateful, avaricious, bloodthirsty, cool in the commission of crime, who, in any well-regulated republic, would have been condemned to the greatest of punishments for the first of his offences.

Nevertheless, the government of Au

Rome tasted peace, pleasure, and abundance. Seneca says of him-"Clementiam non voco lassam crudelitatem”—“I do not call exhausted cruelty, clemency."

It is hard to repress our indignation at reading at the commencement of the Geor-gustus is still admired, because under him gics, that Augustus is one of the greatest of divinities; and that it is not known what place he will one day deign to occupy in heaven; whether he will reign in the air, or become the protector of cities, ar vouchsafe to accept the empire of the

seas:

An Deus immensi venias maris, ac tua nauta
Numina sola celant tibi serviat ultima Thule.

Ariosto speaks with much more sense as well as grace, when he says in his fine thirty-fifth canto

Non fu si santo ne benigno Augusto
Come la tromba di Virgilio sonna;
L'aver avuto in poesia buon gusto
La proscriptione iniqua gli perdona, &c.
Augustus was not quite so mild and chaste
As he's by honest Virgil represented;
But then, the tyrant had poetic taste;
With this the poet fully was contented, &c.

The Cruelties of Augustus.

If Augustus was long abandoned to { the most shameful and frantic dissipation, his cruelty was no less uniform and deliberate. His proscriptions were published in the midst of feasting and revelry: he proscribed more than three hundred senators, two thousand knights, and one hundred obscure but wealthy heads of families, whose only crime was their being rich. Anthony and Octavius had them killed, solely that they might get possession of their money; in which they differed not the least from highway robbers, who are condemned to the wheel.

Octavius, immediately after the Persian war, gave his veterans all the lands

It is thought that Augustus became milder when crime was no longer necessary to him; and that, being absolute master, he saw that he had no other interest than to appear just. But it appears to me that he still was pitiless rather than clement; for, after the battle of Actium, he had Antony's son murdered at the feet of Cæsar's statue; and he was so barbarous as to have young Cæsarian, the son of Cæsar and Cleopatra, beheaded, though he had recognized him as king of Egypt.

Suspecting one day that the prætor Quintus Gallius had come to an audience with a poniard under his robe, he had him put to the torture in his presence; and, in his indignation at hearing that senator call him a tyrant, he tore out his eyes with his own hands; at least, so says Suetonius.

We know that Cæsar, his adopted father, was great enough to pardon almost all his enemies; but I do not find that Augustus pardoned one of his. I have great doubts of his pretended clemency to Cinna. This affair is mentioned neither by Suetonius nor by Tacitus. Suetonius, who speaks of all the conspiracies against Augustus, would not have failed to mention the most memorable. The singularity of giving a consulship to Cinna in return for the blackest perfidy, would not have

escaped every cotemporary historian. on Titus, on Trajan, and the Antonines. Dion Cassius speaks of it only alter Se-It even became customary in the complireca; and this passage in Seneca has the pliments paid to Emperors on their acappearance rather of declamation than of cession, to wish that they might be more historical truth. Besides, Seneca lays fortunate than Augustus, and more virtuthe scene in Gaul, and Dion at Rome: ous than Trajan. this contradiction deprives the occurrence of all remaining verisimilitude. Not one of our Roman Histories, compiled in haste and without selection, has discussed this interesting fact. Lawrence Echard's History has appeared to enlightened men to be as faulty as it is mutilated: writers have rarely been guided by the spirit of

examination.

It is now, therefore, allowable to consider Augustus as a clever and fortunate

monster.

Louis Racine, son of the great Racine, and heir to a part of his talents, seems to forget himself when he says, in his Re flections on Poetry, that "Horace and Virgil spoiled Augustus; they exhausted their art in poisoning the mind of Augustus by their praises." These expressions would lead one to believe that the eulogies so meanly lavished by these two great poets, corrupted this Emperor's fine disposition. But Louis Racine very well knew that Augustus was a very bad man, regarding crime and virtue with indifference, availing himself alike of the horrors of the one and the appearances of the other, attentive solely to his own interest, employing bloodshed and peace, arms and laws, religion and pleasure, only to make himself master of the earth, and sacrificing everything to himself. Louis Racine only shows us, that Virgil and Horace had servile souls.

Cinna might be suspected, or convicted, by Augustus, of some infidelity; and, when the affair had been cleared up, he might honour him with the vain title of consul: but it is not at all probable that Cinna sought by a conspiracy to seize the supreme authority-he, who had never commanded an army, was supported by no-party, and was a man of no consideration in the empire. It is not very likely that a mere subordinate courtier would think of succeeding a sovereign who had been twenty years firmly established on his throne, and had heirs; nor is it more likely that Augustus would make him consul immediately after the conspiracy. If Cinna's adventure be true, Augustus He is, unfortunately, too much in the pardoned him only because he could not right when he reproaches Corneille with do otherwise, being overcome by the rea-having dedicated Cinna to the financier soning or the importunities of Livia, who had acquired great influence over him, and persuaded him, says Seneca, that pardon would do him more service than chastisement. It was then only through policy, that he, for once, was merciful; it certainly was not through generosity.

Shall we give a robber credit for clemency, because, being enriched and secure, enjoying in peace the fruits of his rapine, he is not every day assassinating the sons and grandsons of the proscribed, while they are kneeling to and worshipping him? After being a barbarian, he was a prudent politician. It is worthy of remark, that posterity never gave hin the title of virtuous, which was bestowed

Montoron, and said to that receiver, "What you more especially have in common with Augustus is, the generosity with which," &c. for, though Augustus was the most wicked of Roman citizens, it must be confessed that the first of the Emperors, the master, the pacificator, the legislator of the then known world, ought not to be placed absolutely on a level with a clerk to a comptroller-general in Gaul.

The same Louis Racine, in justly condemning the mean adulation of Corneille, and the baseness of the age of Horace and Virgil, marvellously lays hold of this pas sage in Massillon's Petit Carême :-" It is no less culpable to fail in truth towards

I ask your pardon, Father Massillon; but this stroke of yours is very oratorical, Count Raymond, who had submitted very preacher-like, very exaggerated. The to the flagellation in order to preserve his League and the Fronde have, if I am not states, underwent this ignominy to no deceived, done more harm that Quinault's purpose whatever. He had to defend prologues. There is no way of condem- by arms what he had thought to preserve ning Quinault as a rebel. "Est modus by suffering a few stripes; he saw his in rebus," Father Massillon, which is towns laid in ashes, and died in 1213 wanting in all manufacturers of sermons. { amid the vicissitudes of the most sangui