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power spear and shield were idle trophies of the past: "the trumpet spoke not to the alarmed throng." Hush, ye palpitations of Rome! was the cry of the superb Aurelian,* from his far-off pavilion in the deserts of the Euphrates-Hush, fluttering heart of the eternal city! Fall back into slumber, ye wars, and rumours of wars! Turn upon your couches of down, ye children of Romulus-sink back into your voluptuous repose: We, your almighty armies, have chased into darkness those phantoms that had broken your dreams. We have chased, we have besieged, we have crucified, we have slain." Nihil est, Romulei Quirites, quod timere possitis. Ego efficiam ne sit aliqua solicitudo Romana. Vacate ludis vacate circensibus. Nos publicæ necessitates teneant: vos occupent voluptates."-Did ever Siren warble so dulcet a song to ears already prepossessed and medicated with spells of Circean effeminacy?

But in this world all things re-act: and the very extremity of any force is the seed and nucleus of a counteragency. You might have thought it as easy (in the words of Shakspeare) to "Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters,"

as to violate the majesty of the imperial eagle, or to ruffle "one dowle that's in his plume." But luxurious ease is the surest harbinger of pain; and the dead lulls of tropical seas are the immediate forerunners of tornadoes. The more absolute was the security obtained by Cæsar for his people, the more inevitable was his own ruin. Scarcely had Aurelian sung his requiem to the agitations of Rome, before a requiem was sung by his assassins to his own warlike spirit. Scarcely had Probus, another Aurelian, proclaimed the eternity of peace, and, by way of attesting his own martial supremacy, had commanded "that the brazen throat of war should cease to roar," when the trumpets of the

four winds proclaimed his own death by murder. Not as any thing extraordinary; for, in fact, violent deathdeath by assassination—was the regular portal (the porta Libitina, or funeral gate,) through which the Cæsars passed out of this world; and to die in their beds was the very rare exception to that stern rule of fate. Not, therefore, as in itself at all noticeable, but because this particular murder of Probus stands scenically contrasted with the great vision of Peace, which he fancied as lying in clear revelation before him, permit us, before we proceed with our argument, to rehearse his golden promises. The sabres were already unsheathed, the shirtsleeves were already pushed up from those murderous hands, which were to lacerate his throat, and to pierce his heart, when he ascended the Pisgah from which he descried the Saturnian ages to succeed :-" Brevi," said he, "milites non necessarios habebimus. Romanus jam miles erit nullus. Omnia possidebimus. Respublica orbis terrarum, ubique secura, non arma fabricabit. Boves habebuntur aratro: equus nascetur ad pacem. Nulla erunt bella: nulla captivitas. Ubique pax: ubique Romanæ leges: ubique judices nostri.” The historian himself, tame and creeping as he is in his ordinary style, warms in sympathy with the Emperor: his diction blazes up into a sudden explosion of prophetic grandeur: and he adopts all the views of Cæsar. "Nonne omnes barbaras nationes subjecerat pedibus?" he demands with lyrical tumult: and then, while confessing the immediate disappointment of his hopes, thus repeats the great elements of the public felicity whenever they should be realised by a Cæsar equally martial for others, but more fortunate for himself:-" “Eternos thesauros haberet Romana respublica. Nihil expenderetur à principe; nihil à possessore redderetur. Aurcum profecto seculum promittebat. Nulla futura erant castra: nusquam lituus audiendus: arma non erant fabricanda,

*"Of the superb Aurelian :"—The particular occasion was the insurrection in the East, of which the ostensible leaders were the great lieutenants of Palmyra-Odenathus, and his widow, Zenobia. The alarm at Rome was out of all proportion to the danger, and well illustrated the force of the great historian's aphorism-- Omne ignotum pro magnifico. In one sentence of his despatch Aurelian aimed at a contest with the great Julian gasconade of Veni, vidi, vici. His words are- -Fugavimus, obsedimus, cruciavimus, occidimus."

Populus iste militantium, qui nunc bellis civilibus Rempublicam vexat"aye! how was that to be absorbed? How would that vast crowd of halfpay emeriti employ itself?" Araret: studiis incumberet erudiretur artibus: navigaret." And he closes his prophetic raptures thus: "Adde quod nullus occideretur in bello. Di boni! quid tandem vos offenderet Respublicâ Romana, cui talem principem sustulistis?"

Even in his lamentations, it is clear that he mourns as for a blessing delayed-not finally denied. The land of promise still lay, as before, in steady vision below his feet; only that it waited for some happier Augustus, who, in the great lottery of Cæsarian destinies, might happen to draw the rare prize of a prosperous reign not prematurely blighted by the assassin; with whose purple alourgis might mingle no fascia of crape-with whose imperial laurels might entwine no ominous cypress. The hope of a millennial armistice, of an eternal rest for the earth, was not dead: once again only, and for a time, it was sleeping in abeyance and expectation. That blessing, that millennial blessing, it seems, might be the gift of Imperial Rome.

II.-Well: and why not? the reader demands. What have we to say against it? This Cæsar, or that historian, may have carried his views a little too far, or too prematurely; yet, after all, the very enor mity of what they promised must be held to argue the enormity of what had been accomplished. To give any plausibility to a scheme of perpetual peace, war must already have become rare, and must have been banished to a prodigious distance. It was no longer the hearths and the altars, home and religious worship, which quaked under the tumults of war. It was the purse which suffered--the exchequer of the state; secondly, the exchequer of each individual; thirdly, and in the end, the interests of agriculture, of commerce, of navigation. This is what the historian indicates, in promising his brother Romans that "omnia possidebimus:" by which, perhaps, he did not mean to lay the stress on "omnia," as if, in addition to their own property, they were to have that of alien or frontier nations,

but (laying the stress on the word possidebimus) meant to say, with re. gard to property already their own"We shall no longer hold it as jointproprietors with the state, and as liable to fluctuating taxation, but shall henceforwards possess it in absolute exclusive property.' This is what he indicates in saying—Boves habebuntur aratro: that is, the oxen, one and all available for the plough, shall no longer be open to the everlasting claims of the public frumentarii for conveying supplies to the frontier armies. This is what he indicates in saying of the individual liable to military service—that he should no longer live to slay or to be slain, for barren bloodshed or violence, but that henceforth "araret," or "navigaret." All these passages, by pointing the expectations emphatically to benefits of purse exonerated, and industry emancipated, sufficiently argue the class of interests which then suffered by war: that it was the interests of private property, of agricultural improvement, of commercial industry, upon which exclusively fell the evils of a belligerent state under the Roman empire: and there already lies a mighty blessing achieved for social existence -when sleep is made sacred, and thresholds secure; when the temple of human life is safe, and the temple of female honour is hallowed. These great interests, it is admitted, were sheltered under the mighty dome of the Roman empire: that is already an advance made towards the highest civilisation and this is not shaken because a particular emperor should be extravagant, or a particular historian romantic.

No, certainly but stop a moment at this point. Civilisation, to the extent of security for life, and the primal rights of man, necessarily grows out of every strong government. And it follows also that, as this government widens its sphere-as it pushes back its frontiers, ultra et Garamantas et Indos, in that proportion will the danger diminish (for in fact the possibility diminishes) of foreign incursions. The sense of permanent security from conquest, or from the inroad of marauders, must of course have been prodigiously increased when the nearest standing enemy of Rome was beyond the Tigris and the Inn-as compared with those times when Carthage, Spain,

Gaul, Macedon, presented a ringfence of venomous rivals, and when every little nook in the eastern Mediterranean swarmed with pirates. Thus far, inevitably, the Roman police, planting one foot of its golden compasses in the same eternal centre, and with the other describing an arch continually wider, must have banished all idea of public enemies, and have deepened the sense of security beyond calculation. Thus far we have the benefits of police; and those are amongst the earliest blessings of civilisation; and they are one indispensable condition-what in logic is called the conditio sine qua non, for all the other blessings. But that, in other words, is a negative cause, (a cause which, being absent, the effect is absent; but not the positive cause, (or causa sufficiens), which, being present, the effect will be present. The secu rity of the Roman empire was the indispensable condition, but not in itself a sufficient cause of those other elements which compose a true civilisation. Rome was the centre of a high police, which radiated to Parthia eastwards, to Britain westwards, but not of a high civilisation.

On the contrary, what we maintain is that the Roman civilisation was imperfect ab intra-imperfect in its central principle; was a piece of watchwork that began to go downto lose its spring; and was slowly retrograding to a dead stop, from the very moment that it had completed its task of foreign conquest: that it was kept going from the very first by strong reaction and antagonism: that it fell into torpor from the moment when this antagonism ceased to operate: that thenceforwards it oscillated backwards violently to barbarism: that, left to its own principles of civilisation, the Roman empire was barbarizing rapidly from the time of Trajan: that, abstracting from all alien agencies whatever, whether accelerating or retarding, and supposing Western Rome to

have been thrown exclusively upon the resources and elasticity of her own proper civilisation, she was crazy and superannuated by the time of Commodus-must soon have gone to piecesmust have foundered; and, under any possible benefit from favourable accidents co-operating with alien forces, could not, by any great term, have retarded that doom which was written on her drooping energies, prescribed by internal decay, and not at all (as is universally imagined) by external assault.

III." Barbarizing rapidly!" the reader murmurs-"Barbarism! Oh yes, I remember the Barbarians broke in upon the Western Empire-the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, Huns, Heruli, and swarms beside. These wretches had no tasteno literature, probably very few ideas; and naturally they barbarized and rebarbarized wherever they moved. But surely the writer errs: this influx of barbarism was not in Trajan's time at the very opening of the second century from Christ, but throughout the fifth century." No, reader; it is not we who err, but you. These were not the barbarians of Rome. That is the miserable fiction of Italian vanity, always stigmatizing better men than themselves by the name of barbarians; and in fact we all know, that to be an ultramontane is with them to be a barbarian. The horrible charge against the Greeks of old, viz., that sua tantum mirantur, a charge implying in its objects the last descent of narrow sensibility and of illiterate bigotry, in modern times has been true only of two nations, and those two are the French and the Italians. But, waiving that topic, we affirm-and it is the purpose of our essay to affirm—that the barbarism of Rome grew out of Rome herself; that these pretended barbarians-Gothic, Vandalish,* Lombard-or by whatever name known to modern history-were in reality the restorers and regenerators of the effete

*" Pretended barbarians, Gothic, Vandalish, &c."-Had it been true that these tramontane people were as ferocious in manners or appearance as was alleged, it would not therefore have followed that they were barbarous in their modes of thinking and feeling; or, if that also had been true, surely it became the Romans to recollect what very barbarians, both in mind, and manners, and appearance, were some of their own Cæsars. Meantime it appears, that not only Alaric the Goth, but even Attila the Hun, in popular repute the most absolute Ogre of all the Transalpine invaders, turns out in more thoughtful representations to have been a prince of peculiarly mild demeanour, and apparently upright character.

Roman intellect; that, but for them, the indigenous Italian would probably have died out in scrofula, madness, leprosy; that the sixth or seventh century would have seen the utter extinction of these Italian strulbrugs; for which opinion, if it were important, we could show cause. But it is much less important to show cause in behalf of this negative proposition" that the Goths and Vandals were not the barbarians of the western empire" than in behalf of this affirmative proposition, "that the Romans were." We do not wish to overlay the subject, but simply to indicate a few of the many evidences which it is in our power to adduce. We mean to rely, for the present, upon four arguments, as exponents of the barbarous and barbarizing tone of feeling, which, like so much moss or lichens, had gradually overgrown the Roman mind, and by the third century had strangled all healthy vegetation of natural and manly thought. During this third century it was, in its latter half, that most of the Augustan history was probably composed. Laying aside the two Victors, Dion Cassius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and a few more indirect notices of history during this period, there is little other authority for the annals of the Western Empire than this Augustan history; and at all events, this is the chief well-head of that history; hither we must resort for most of the personal biography, and the portraiture of characters connected with that period; and here only we find the regular series of princes-the whole gallery of Cæsars, from Trajan to the immediate predecessor of Dioclesian. The composition of this work has been usually distributed amongst six authors, viz., Spartian, Capitolinus, Lampridius, Volcatius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio, and Vopiscus. Their several shares, it is true, have been much disputed to and fro; and other questions have been raised, affect ing the very existence of some amongst them. But all this is irrelevant to our present purpose, which applies to the work, but not at all to the waiters, excepting in so far as they (by whatever names known) were notoriously and demonstrably persons belonging to that era, trained in Roman habits of thinking, connected with the court, intimate with the great Palatine officers, and therefore presumably men of rank and education. We rely, in so far as we

rely at all upon this work, upon these two among its characteristic features: 1st, Upon the quality and style of its biographic notices; 2dly, Upon the remarkable uncertainty which hangs over all lives a little removed from the personal cognisance or immediate era of the writer. But as respects, not the history, but the subjects of the history, we rely, 3dly, Upon the peculiar traits of feeling which gradually began to disfigure the ideal conception of the Roman Cæsar in the minds of his subjects; 4thly, Without reference to the Augustan history, or to the subjects of that history, we rely gener ally, for establishing the growing barbarism of Rome, upon the condition of the Roman literature after the period of the first twelve Cæsars.

IV. First of all, we infer the increasing barbarism of the Roman mind from the quality of the personal notices and portraitures exhibited throughout these biographical records. The whole may be described by one word-anecdotage. It is impossible to conceive the dignity of history more degraded than by the petty nature of the anecdotes which compose the bulk of the communications about every Cæsar, good or bad, great or little. They are not merely domestic and purely personal, when they ought to have been Cæsarian, Augustan, imperatorial-they pursue Cæsar not only to his fireside, but into his bedchamber, into his bath, into his cabinet, nay, even (sit honor auribus!) into his cabinet d'aisance; not merely into the Palatine closet, but into the Palatine water-closet. Thus of Heliogabalus we are told-" onus ventris auro excepit-minxit myrrhinis et onychinis;" that is, Cæsar's lasanum was made of gold, and his matula was made of onyx, or of the undetermined myrrhine material. And so on, with respect to the dresses of Cæsar ;—how many of every kind he wore in a week

of what materials they were made -with what ornaments. So again, with respect to the meals of Cæsar ;— what dishes, what condiments, what fruits, what confections prevailed at each course; what wines he preferred; how many glasses (cyathos) he usually drank, whether he drank more when he was angry; whether he diluted his wine with water; halfand-half, or how? Did he get drunk often? How many times a-week?

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*

What a horror would have seized this Augustan scribbler, this Roman Tims, if he could have seen this "mighty phantom" at his elbow looking over his inanities; and what a horror would have seized the phantom! Once, in the course of his aulic memorabilia, the writer is struck with a sudden glimpse of such an idea; and he reproaches himself for recording such infinite littleness. After reporting some anecdotes, in the usual Augustan style, about an Imperial rebel, as for instance that he had ridden upon ostriches (which he says was the next thing to flying ;) that he had eaten a dish of boiled hippopotamus ;* and that, having a fancy for tickling the catastrophes of crocodiles, he had anointed himself with crocodile fat, by which means he humbugged the crocodiles, ceasing to be Cæsar, and passing for a crocodile-swimming and playing amongst them; these glorious facts being recorded, he goes on to say-" Sed hæc scire quid prodest? Cum et Livius et Sallustius taceant res leves de iis quorum vitas scribendas arripuerint. Non enim scimus quales mulos Clodius habuerit ; nec utrum Tusco equo sederit Catilina an Sardo; vel quali chlamyde Pompeius usus fuerit, an purpura.'

No: we

do not know. Livy would have died "in the high Roman fashion" before he would have degraded himself, by such babble of nursery maids, or of palace pimps and eaves-droppers.

But it is too evident that babble of

this kind grew up not by any accident, but as a natural growth, and by a sort of physical necessity, from the condition of the Roman mind after it had ceased to be excited by opposition in foreign nations. It was not merely the extinction of republican institutions which operated (that might operate as a co-cause,) but, had these institutions even survived, the unresisted energies of the Roman mind, having no purchase, nothing to push against, would have collapsed. The eagle, of all birds, would be the first to flutter and sink plumb down, if the atmosphere should make no resistance to his wings. The first Roman of note who began this system of anecdotage was Suetonius. In him the poison of the degradation was much diluted, by the strong remembrances, still surviving, of the mighty republic. The glorious sunset was still burning with gold and orange lights in the west. True, the disease had commenced; but the habits of health were still strong for restraint and for conflict with its power. Besides that, Suetonius graces his minutiæ, and embalms them in amber, by the exquisite finish of his rhetoric. But his case, coming so early among the Cæsarian annals, is sufficient to show that the growth of such history was a spontaneous growth from the circumstances of the empire, viz. from the total collapse of all public antagonism.

The next literature in which the spirit of anecdotage arose was that of France. From the age of Louis Treize, or perhaps of Henri Quatre, to the Revolution, this species of chamber memoirs-this eaves-dropping biography-prevailed so as to strangle authentic history. The parasitical plant absolutely killed the supporting tree. And one remark we will venture to make on that fact: the French literature would have been killed, and the national mind reduced to the strulbrug condition, had it not been for the situation of France amongst other great kingdoms, making her liable to potent reactions from them. The Memoirs of France, that is, the valet-de-chambre's archives

* "Eaten a dish of boiled hippopotamus:"-We once thought that some error might exist in the text-edisse for edidisse-and that a man exposed a hippopotamus at the games of the amphitheatre; but we are now satisfied that he ate the hippopotamus,

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