substituted for the statesman's, the ambassador's, the soldier's, the politician's, would have extinguished all other historic composition, as in fact they nearly did, but for the insulation of France amongst nations with more masculine habits of thought. That saved France. Rome had no such advantage; and Rome gave way. The props, the buttresses, of the Roman intellect, were all cancered and honeycombed by this dry-rot in her political energies. One excuse there is: storms yield tragedies for the historian; the dead calms of a universal monarchy leave him little but personal memoranda. In such a case he is nothing, if he is not anecdotical.

V. Secondly, we infer the barbarism of Rome, and the increasing barbarism, from the inconceivable ignorance which prevailed through out the Western Empire, as to the most interesting public facts that were not taken down on the spot by a tachygraphus or short-hand reporter. Let a few years pass, and every thing was forgotten about every body. Within a few years after the death of Aurelian, though a kind of saint amongst the armies and the populace of Rome, (for to the Senate he was odious,) no person could tell who was the Emperor's mother, or where she lived; though she must have been a woman of station and notoriety in her lifetime, having been a high priestess at some temple unknown. Alexander Severus, a very interesting Cæsar, who recalls to an Englishman the idea of his own Edward the Sixth, both as a prince equally amiable, equally disposed to piety, equally to reforms, and because, like Edward, he was so placed with respect to the succession and position of his reign, between unnatural monsters and bloody extermi. nators, as to reap all the benefit of contrast and soft relief;-this Alexander was assassinated. That was of

course. But still, though the fact was of course, the motives often varied, and the circumstances varied; and the reader would be glad to know, in Shakspeare's language," for which of his virtues" it was deemed requi. site to murder him; as also, if it would not be too much trouble to the historian, who might be the murderers; and what might be their rank, and their names, and their recompense-whether a halter or a palace, But nothing of all this can be learned, And why? All had been forgotten.* Lethe had sent all her waves over the whole transaction; and the man who wrote within thirty years, found no vestige recoverable of the imperial murder more than you or we, reader, would find at this day, if we should search for fragments of that imperial tent in which the murder happened. Again, with respect to the princes who succeeded immediately to their part of the Augustan history now surviving, princes the most remarkable, and cardinal to the movement of history, viz., Dioclesian and Constantine, many of the weightiest transactions in their lives are washed out as by a sponge. Did Dioclesian hang himself in his garters? or did he die in his bed? Nobody knows. And if Dioclesian hanged himself, why did Dioclesian hang himself? Nobody can guess. Did Constantine, again, marry a second wife?-did this second wife fall in love with her step-son Crispus?-did she, in resentment of his scorn, bear false witness against him to his father?-did his father, in consequence, put him to death? What an awful domestic tragedy !—was it true? Nobody knows. On the one hand, Eusebius does not so much as allude to it; but, on the other hand, Eusebius had his golden reasons for favouring Constantine, and this was a matter to be hushed up rather than blazoned, Tell it not in Gath! Publish it not in Ascalon! Then again, on the one

hand, the tale seems absolutely a leaf torn out of the Hippolytus of Euripides. It is the identical story, only the name is changed; Constantine-is Theseus, his new wife is Phædra, Crispus is Hippolytus. So far it seems rank with forgery. Yet again, on the other hand, such a duplicate did bonâ fide occur in modern history. Such a domestic tragedy was actually rehearsed, with one unimportant change; such a leaf was positively torn out of Euripides. Philip II. played the part of Theseus, Don Carlos the part of Hippolytus, and the Queen filled the situation (without the animus) of Phædra. Again, therefore, one is reduced to blank ignorance, and the world will never know the true history of the Cæsar who first gave an establishment and an earthly throne to Christianity, because history had slept the sleep of death before that Cæsar's time, and because the great muse of history had descended from Parnassus, and was running about Cæsar's palace in the bedgown and slippers of a chambermaid.

Many hundred of similar lacunæ we could assign, with regard to facts the

most indispensable to be known; but we must hurry onwards. Meantime, let the reader contrast with this dearth of primary facts in the history of the empire, and their utter extinction after even the lapse of twenty years, the extreme circumstantiality of the republican history, through many centuries back.

VI. Thirdly, we infer the grow ing barbarism of Rome, that is, of the Roman people, as well as the Roman armies, from the brutal, bloody, and Tartar style of their festal exultations after victory, and the Moloch sort of character and functions with which they gradually invested their great Sultan, the Cæsar. One of the ballisteia, that is, the ballets or dances carried through scenes and representative changes, which were performed by the soldiery and by the mobs of Rome upon occasion of any triumphal display, has been preserved, in so far as relates to the words which accompanied the performance; for there was always a verbal accompaniment to the choral parts of the ballisteia. These words ran thus:

But, in reality, the national mind was convulsed and revolutionized by many causes; and we may be assured that it must have been so, both as a cause and as an effect, before that mind could have contemplated with steadiness the fearful scene of Turkish murder and bloodshed going on for ever in high places. The palace floors in Rome actually rocked and quaked with assassination: snakes were sleeping for ever beneath the flowers and palms of empire: the throne was built upon coffins and any Christian who had read the Apocalypse, whenever he looked at the altar consecrated to Cæsar, on which the sacred fire was burning for ever in the Augustan halls, must have seen below them "the souls of those who had been martyred," and have fancied that he heard them cry

ing out to the angel of retribution"How long? O Lord! how long?"

Gibbon has left us a description, not very powerful, of a case which is all-powerful of itself, and needs no expansion,-the case of a state criminal vainly attempting to escape or to hide himself from Cæsar-from the arm wrapped in clouds, and stretching over kingdoms alike, or oceans, that arrested and drew back the wretch to judgment—from the inevitable eye that slept not nor slumbered, and from which neither Alps interposing, nor immeasurable deserts, nor trackless seas, nor a four months' flight, nor perfect innocence, could screen him. The world-the world of civilisation, was Cæsar's: and he who fled from the wrath of Cæsar, said to himself, of necessity" if I go down to the

sea, there is Cæsar on the shore; if I go into the sands of Bilidulgerid, there is Cæsar waiting for me in the desert; if I take the wings of the morning, and go to the utmost recesses of wild beasts, there is Cæsar before me." All this makes the condition of a criminal under the Western Empire terrific, and the condition even of a subject perilous. But how strange it is, or would be so had Gibbon been a man of more sensibility, that he should have overlooked the converse of the case-viz., the terrific condition of Cæsar, amidst the terror which he caused to others. In fact, both conditions were full of despair. But Cæsar's was the worst, by a great preeminence; for the state criminal could not be made such without his own concurrence; for one moment, at least, it had been within his choice to be no criminal at all; and then for him the thunderbolts of Cæsar slept. But Casar had rarely any choice as to his own election; and for him, therefore, the dagger of the assassin never could sleep. Other men's houses, other men's bedchambers, were generally asylums; but for Cæsar, his own palace had not the privileges of a home. His own armies were no guards-his own pavilion, rising in the very centre of his armies sleeping around him, was no sanctuary. In all these places had Cæsar many times been murdered. All these pledges and sanctities-his household gods, the majesty of the empire, the "sacramentum militare," -all had given way, all had yawned beneath his feet.

The imagination of man can frame nothing so awful-the experience of man has witnessed nothing so awful, as the situation and tenure of the Western Cæsar. The danger which threatened him was like the pestilence which walketh in darkness, but which also walketh in the noon-day. Morning and evening, summer and winter, brought no change or shadow of turning to this particular evil. In that respect it enjoyed the immunities of God-it was the same yesterday, today, and for ever. After three centuries it had lost nothing of its virulence; it was growing worse continually the heart of man ached under the evil, and the necessity of the evil. Can any man measure the sickening fear which must have possessed the hearts of the ladies and the children compo

sing the imperial family? To them the mere terror, entailed like an inheritance of leprosy upon their family above all others, must have made it a woe like one of the evils in the Revelations-such in its infliction—such in its inevitability. It was what Pagan language denominated “a sacred danger;" a danger charmed and consecrated against human alleviation.

At length, but not until about 320 years of murder had elapsed from the inaugural murder of the great imperial founder, Dioclesian rose, and as a last resource of despair, said, let us multiply our image, and try if that will discourage our murderers. Like Kehama, entering the eight gates of Padalon at once, and facing himself eight times over, he appointed an assessor for himself; and each of these co-ordinate Augusti having a subordinate Cæsar, there were in fact four coeval Emperors. Cæsar enjoyed a perpetual alibi: like the royal ghost in Hamlet, Cæsar was hic et ubique. And unless treason enjoyed the same ubiquity, now, at least, one would have expected that Cæsar might sleep in security. But murder-imperial murder-is a Briareus. There was a curse upon the throne of Western Rome: it rocked like the sea, and for some mysterious reason could not find rest; and few princes were more memorably afflicted than the immediate successors to this arrangement.

And

A nation living in the bosom of these funereal convulsions, this endless billowy oscillation of prosperous murder and thrones overturned, could not have been moral; and therefore could not have reached a high civilisation, had other influences favoured. No causes act so fatally on public morality as convulsions in the state. against Rome, all other influences combined. It was a period of awful transition. It was a period of tremendous conflict between all false religions in the world, (for thirty thousand gods were worshipped in Rome,) and a religion too pure to be comprehended. That light could not be comprehended by that darkness. And, in strict philosophic truth, Christianity did not reach its mature period, even of infancy, until the days of the Protestant Reformation. In Rome it has always blended with Paganism: it does so to this day. But then, i.e. up to Dioclesian, (or the period of the

Augustan history,) even that sort of Christianity, even this foul adultera tion of Christianity, had no national influence. Even a pure and holy religion, therefore, by arraying demoniac passions on the side of Paganism, contributed to the barbarizing of Western Rome.

VII. Finally, we infer the barbarism of Rome from the condition of her current literature. Any thing more contemptible than the literature of Western (or indeed of Eastern)Rome after Trajan, it is not possible to conceive. Claudian, and two or three others, about the times of Carinus, are the sole writers in verse through a period of four centuries. Writers in prose there are none after Tacitus and the younger Pliny. Nor in Greek literature is there one man of genius after Plutarch, excepting Lucian. As to Libanius, he would have been "a decent priest where monkeys are the gods ;" and he was worthy to fumigate with his leaden censer, and with incense from such dull weeds as root themselves in Lethe, that earthy idol of modern infidels, the shallow, but at the same time stupid Julian. Upon this subject, however, we have two sum. mary observations to make:-1st, it : is a fatal ignorance in disputing, and has lost many a good cause, not to

perceive on which side rests the onus of proof. Here, because on our alle gation the proposition to be proved would be negative, the onus probandi must lie with our opponents. For we peremptorily affirm, that from Trajan downwards, there was no literature in Rome. To prove a negative is impossible. But any opponent, who takes the affirmative side, and says there was, will find it easy to refute us. Only be it remembered, that one swallow does not make a summer. 2dly,(Which, if true, ought to make all writers on general literature ashamed,) we maintain-that in any one period of sixty years, in any one of those centuries which we call so familiarly the dark ages, (yes, even in the 10th or 11th,) we engage to name more and better books, as the product of the period given, than were produced in the whole 350 years from Trajan to Honorius and Attila. Here, therefore, is at once a great cause, a great effect, and a great exponent of the barbarism which had overshadowed the Western Empire before either Goth or Vandal had gained a settlement in the land. The quality of their history, the tenure of the Cæsars, the total abolition of literature, and the convulsion of public morals,-these were the true key to the Roman decay.

How in the world it comes to pass that people-and worthy, good-hearted people, too, in the main-can have a single relative in existence, from the nearest degree mentioned at the end of the Prayer-Book to a Caledonian cousinship forty-nine times removed inclusive, about whom they care no more than they do about the multitudes against whom they jostle in their everyday walks of life-that is to say, towards whom they do not feel their hearts one whit the warmer because they are relations-is to us a thing, as Celia says, "" wonderful out of all whooping." For ourselves, the mere claim of kindred acts as a sort of magnet upon our affections. We honour, from the bottom of our heart, that hanging together of name and line, that practical applica tion of the maxim, that" blood is thicker NO. CCLXXXIX, VOL. XLVI.

than water,"-in a word, that better part of the spirit of clanship, which so pre-eminently distinguishes the kindly Scot from his more southern brethren. A family gathering is to us a pleasure anxiously anticipated, and fondly remembered," the day it comes is noted as a white day in our lives." We love to see the hearth surrounded by a merry circle of kith and kin, old and young, rich and poor, -what matters it? we love them none the less for being old-Heaven forbid we should do so for being poor. love to hear the kindly mention of those far away, (for, alas! there are few such gatherings without their " vacant places,")-to mark the thousand unpretending, unceremonious, kindly little sayings and doings, so widely different from the stilted politeness and studied attentions of fashion—to listen once

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more to the oft-told family tale-to laugh once again at the oft-repeated family joke. We sometimes begin to have serious thoughts of committing matrimony ourselves, for the sake of enjoying all this sort of thing round a fireside of our own; for this proMalthusian, anti-connubial, bachelor style of living, after all, is but dullish; and we find ourselves continually dropping in upon some brother, or uncle, or cousin, as the case may be, for a dish of tea and chat, and an hour or two of domesticity. Indeed, we al ways make a point of satisfying ourselves, by personal enquiry, as to the existence, health, and happiness, of every member of the family within our reach; but as their name is Legion, and we are strictly impartial in our visitations, we seldom get through the whole series under three weeks or a month. The night before last we made merry with uncle Tom, and having, in imitation of that respected relative, duly swallowed three large tumblers of "something comfortable," and kissed in succession thirteen children, from three months upwards, we made our way home, much to the indignation of our landlady, at one of those small hours which the world, by a strange perversion of the truth, calls "late." Yesterday evening, by way of doing penance for the offence, we inflicted ourselves most unrelentingly upon our brother Charles and his wife, who haven't got over the honeymoon more than a week; and where, of course, there was neither of the afore-mentioned drinkable or kissable commodities to be met with. Tonight-let us see-there is our cousin Horace's new snuggery, and our aunt Tabitha's Howqua's mixture, upon both of which we are pledged to pass sentence at our earliest opportunity. Like Desdemona, we" do perceive here a divided duty;” and how to settle the question is a puzzler. We have it: Most gracious Sovereign! may it please your Majesty's most royal golden image to decide the point for us! So-up you go-Heads, Horace -Tails, Tabitha; -Down you come (Dii avertite omen) head foremost, as we expected!-Tails-Tea, and Tabitha! So be it then- give us our hat and stick.

Ah! our dear aunt, and so there you are this cold evening," cherishing your knees," as Leight Hunt has it, before the fire. And how is the rheu

matism you were complaining of the other morning ?-this frosty night, we fear, bodes it no good: and what is the last new saying your favourite Poll has learned ?—and last, not least, how fares our stout old acquaintance, Sir Thomas the Tortoise-shelly? We think we hear him somewhere about the room, but you haven't ordered candles yet, and we can't quite make him out. Ah! here he is; we feel him rubbing his sleeky person against our dexter leg, to announce his gratification at seeing us; we hardly-think any thing under a stray canary-bird would tempt him away for the next half hour. Hark! he is purring most hospitable welcome, and now we have managed to catch his eye. Thank Heaven we were not created a mouse, for the very first glance of that eye would be enough to fascinate us! Why, it is positive fire; a moth in a dark room might singe himself at it. We would not wake suddenly in the dead of night, and see two such orbs staring upon us, for all England, Scotland, and Ireland, not to mention the Land of Leeks. We should think the old gentleman, par excellence, had been watching while we slept, to catch any awkward secrets we might chance to discharge to our deaf pillows, and patiently waiting till we awoke, to carry us off bodily on an involuntary visit to his subterraneous dominions: such eyes as those, at such an hour, might fright from its propriety the most stainless conscience that ever sweetened slumber :- they would "murder sleep," as effectually as Macbeth, for the next four-and-twenty hours at least. We positively think they would soon make us nervous even now, with their fixed green glare bent upon us; but here comes Mary with the lights, and we are relieved. So apparently is not Sir Thomas, for, albeit doubly convinced by their entrance that we are really and truly your very loving and unworthy nephew, he seems by no means best pleased with the sudden flood of light, which renders all further scrutiny on the point unnecessary. What would we not give for some Gottfried mind to "burst his cerements," and rise, brush in hand, to paint him, as he has turned him round and seated himself in philosophical meditation on the Wallsends that burn so cheerfully before us? He is evidently yielding himself up to all the luxury of a brown study: