and who used frequently to spend the greatest part of the day in contemplating the beauties of them, extolled Marcellus as much for the pleasure he had given them. "We shall now," said they, "no longer be reckoned among the barbarians. That rust, which we Other have been so long contracting, will soon be worn off. generals have conquered our enemies, but Marcellus has conquered our ignorance. We begin to see with new eyes, and have a new world of beauties opening before us. Let the Romans be polite, as well as victorious; and let us learn to excel the nations in taste, as well as to conquer them with our arms."-Spence. CICERO, De Senectute, § 10. In Verrem, Act ii. lib. ii. § 3, sqq. lib. iii. § 9. SALLUST, Catilin. c. 53, 54. CICERO'S LETTERS—A PICTURE OF THE TIMES. IN Cicero's extant correspondence we seem to be present at which involves the destinies of Rome. We hear the groans of the expiring republic, which had been mortally wounded during the long civil wars of Marius and Sylla, and was fast sinking under the flood of social and political corruption, which is sure to follow in the train of civil war. At one time we watch with eager impatience the arrival of a courier at Tusculum, with a letter from Atticus, telling his friend the news of the day; and in Cicero's reply we read all the fluctuations of hope and fear, which agitated him during the momentous crisis of his country's fate. At another, we contemplate the great orator and statesman in the seclusion of his villa, as a plain country gentleman, busying himself with improvements on his estate, building farms, laying out and planting shrubberies, and turning water-courses, or amusing himself with pictures and statues, and the various objects which interest a man of refined and cultivated taste. At another, we find him at Rome, sick, weary, and disgusted with the din of strife, mistrusting every body where no one seems worthy of trust, and harping ever on the vanity of ambition and the worthlessness of popular applause. We see him at one moment exalted to the summit of human glory, when saluted in the senate by the proud title of Pater Patriæ; and at another sunk in the lowest depths of despair, when he is a wandering fugitive, exiled from Rome, and tells his wife that while he writes he is blinded by his tears.-Forsyth. CICERO, Ad Att. vii. Epist. 19, 20, 23. SUCE DESPERATE PROJECTS OF CATILINE. UCH a state of society already trembled on the verge of dissolution, and reflecting men must have shuddered at the frailness of the bands which still held it together, and the manifold energies at work for its destruction. Catiline's designs, suspended for a moment, were ripening to another crisis; and the citizens. pointed with horror to the victim of a guilty conscience, stalking through the streets with abrupt and agitated gait, his eyes bloodshot, his visage ashy pale, revolving in his restless soul the direst schemes of murder and conflagration. Involved in ruinous debt, his last hope of extrication had been the plunder of a province. The spoils of the prætorship had been wrested from him by the rapacity of his judges or his accuser, and access to the consulship was denied him. But his recent escape confirmed him in the assurance that he was too noble a culprit to be convicted: he scarcely deigned to veil his intrigues, while he solicited the aid of men of the highest families in the city. SALLUST, Catilin. c. 15-18, 21. TACITUS, Hist. iii. c. 84. CICERO, In Catilinam, i. In Verrem, Act ii. lib. i. § 7. IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS. HE place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of THE place was worthy of which had resounded with acclama tions at the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter King-at-arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on points of law. The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated round the queen the fair-haired young daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the ambassadors of great kings and commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid.— Macaulay. CICERO, pro Milone. § 1-3. PLINY, Epist. ii. 11. IMPEACHMENT OF CATILINE. ATILINE had kept his seat throughout this terrible inflic CA tion, agitated by rage and apprehension, yet trusting to the favour of his numerous connections, and relying on the stolid incredulity of the mass of the audience; for the habitual use of exaggerated invective had blunted the force of truth, and rendered the senators callous for the most part even to the most impassioned oratory. The appearance, perhaps, of the consul's myrmidons, and the fear, not of any legal sentence, but of popular violence, at last made him start to his feet. He muttered a few broken sentences in a tone of deprecation, appealing to his birth, rank, and aristocratic sentiments in gage of his loyalty, and in contrast to the specious pretensions of the base-born foreigner, his accuser. But the senators, encouraged or awed by the presence of the knights, murmured and groaned around him, calling him an enemy and a parricide. Then at last, losing all self-command, Catiline rushed. wildly out of the chamber, exclaiming " Driven to destruction by my enemies, I will smother the conflagration of my own house in the ruin of the city." SALLUST, Catilin. c. 31. CICERO, In Catilinam, i. L PRUDENCE AND PERSEVERANCE OF WILLIAM III. IN ORGANIZING OPPOSITION TO THE FRENCH. A YEAR had hardly elapsed when arrangements were made for renewing the contest with tenfold fury. The steps which were taken at that time to compose, to reconcile, to unite, and to discipline all Europe against the growth of France, certainly furnish to a statesman the finest and most interesting part in the history of that great period. It formed the master-piece of King William's policy, dexterity, and perseverance. Baffled as that monarch was, and almost heart-broken at the disappointment he met with in the mode he first proposed for that great end, he held on his course. He was faithful to his object; and in councils, as in arms, over and over again repulsed, over and over again he returned to the charge. He persevered to expel the fears of his people by his fortitude, to steady their fickleness by his constancy, to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom, to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelary angel of the human race. In spite of the ministers, who staggered under the weight that his mind imposed upon theirs, he infused into them his own soul; he renewed in them their ancient heart; he rallied them in the same cause. LIVY, xxiii. c. 33. xxxiv. c. 6. xxxvi. c. 7, 41. xxviii. c. 12. IRRESOLUTION OF THE EMPEROR NERO ON THE AT T times, even in this hopeless situation, his native ferocity returned upon him, and he was believed to have framed plans for removing all his enemies at once--the leaders of the |