material being twenty years or more old, he either possessed a wonderful memory, kept a diary or invented freely, for there is more detail in the early years than later. The stirring events that occurred before 1610 are described with as much freshness and verve as if they were not a week old. Whichever was the method, he was a gifted writer.

VI

I feel that I have done faint justice to one of the most individual of books, evidently written for the public and withheld from it so long. The one short volume contains no end of quotable stories, but nothing less than a translation can convey the color of the original. The Captain's particular art was the subjugation of rebellious recruits. One must read how shrewdly he dealt with the thieves at Ecija; with what a combination of diplomacy and courage he quelled the mutineers at Cadiz; how neatly he persuaded his company to remain five days at Nola during an eruption of Vesuvius, while ashes rained and lava flowed about them, till orders came to withdraw. Nor was he awed by the great. One of the most amusing passages tells how he defied the governor of Romagna, planning to give him a sound beating and then flee beyond his jurisdiction. And even if we make allowance for the natural bravado of a soldier-author, it appears that he faced the dignitaries of the Spanish court and Philip IV himself, with the mettle of a man who has dealt more wounds than he has received. Each of these anecdotes, despatched in a graphic page, would have furnished Mérimée a story and Dumas a novel.

I have many times observed one point of similarity between the productions of the greatest intellects and those of the crude and uncultivated. Writers may be divided into three layers: at the top the supreme thinkers, and at the bottom the quite untrained. Between them lies a vast

host of clever quill-drivers who write easily and possess a style, but whose ideas are drowned in a river of harmonious words. Amiel called the medium of expansion a necessary pâte, and regretted that he was not able to produce it. It might be named an excipient, like that used by pharmacists in compounding pills, to hold the true medicaments and give them bulk. Literature from the top and bottom layers is alike in lacking make-weight. When we read Montaigne or Bacon or Pascal we are astonished to find an idea in every line, just symbol of the powerful brain that conceived. An ordinary man may also, if he write little, say nothing that is not of meaning.

Contreras falls in the latter class. Having certain deeds to narrate, he did it with wise avoidance of the superfluous and a skill in wording that is far above the average. His haphazard style is the despair of a grammarian and the delight of a lover of racy Castilian. To find an antecedent for all his relatives or a subject for all his verbs is as hard as to lay bare the motives of all his acts. But he was not for nothing the contemporary of Cervantes and Quevedo; the picturesque word falls from his pen without an effort, although he says: "Here goes my book, dry and unwatered, as God created it and I was able, without rhetoric nor quillets, formed only on the truth." It is a book that can be read word by word.

Research has not revealed the history of Alonso de Contreras' final years. Historians of the period do not mention him, although a few of his official petitions have been found. He tells us that he was honored with the friendship of the fertile playwright, Lope de Vega, whose house he shared as guest during more than eight months. We know that Lope, phoenix of intellects and king of improvisators, dedicated a drama to the Captain. In the prefatory note the poet recounts the salient exploits of his friend and promises to write a lengthy poem about them. He never did, and perhaps the Captain was led by the omission to set them down himself. The world was the

gainer; no flowery octaves could match the soldier's jerky, honest phrases.

We do not know when Don Alonso died, nor how. "Hung, king of an isle, governor of a city, monk, beggar, brilliant officer?" asks the French translator; for in life he had been all but the first. We do not know. But we will take oath that the old warrior set his face to the foe, and that the reaper did not conquer him without a struggle.

TACITUS AND SOME ROMAN IDEALS*

JEFFERSON ELMORE

In the first book of the Annals1 Tacitus relates the case of two Roman knights who were charged with impiety, the one for having sold a statue of Augustus along with the pleasure garden in which it stood, and the other for having sworn a false oath by the divinity of Augustus. The accusations, which were first made before the consuls, came to the attention of the emperor Tiberius, who decided that no offence had been committed. "There was no impiety," he said, "in including a statue of Augustus, as of any other deity, in the sale of houses or gardens. As for the perjury it should be judged as if the name of Jupiter had been taken in vain; the gods must avenge their own wrongs."2 In this last sentence Tacitus states the great principle of religious toleration, which, except in cases of suspected political disaffection, was the fundamental policy of the Roman government. It was doubtless a somewhat cynical toleration. "To the mass of the Romans" says Gibbon, "all religions were equally true, to the magistrates they were all equally useful, and to the philosophers all equally false. However this may be, Roman tolerance as a rule

* President's address delivered before the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast in San Francisco, November 29, 1915. 1 i 73.

2 The passages cited from the Annals are for the most part given in Ramsay's rendering, those from the Histories and the Agricola, in Fyfe's.

left the mind free, and it is glory enough for Tacitus to have singled out for approval and special record the principle which the modern world has only recently put into practice, and to have given it a powerful and altogether fitting expression.

Likewise in his theory of life in general the significance of Tacitus is in his relation to already existing beliefs.3 What is the dominating principle in human affairs? Is it providence, or chance, or necessity, or freedom? In certain passages he speaks as if the things that happen were determined by the gods, but he realizes that the difficulty of this doctrine is that the evil so often flourish while the good are cast down. It may be that there is a moral good which exists independently of external circumstances a solution of the problem to which we ourselves frequently resort. More commonly Tacitus sees in events the work of chance. This is not the Latin Fortuna so much as Túxn, the powerful Greek goddess; or, if it be regarded more scientifically, it is a cause whose factors are so complex and so unknown that its operation can not be predicted. It is the same principle which plays so great a part in the modern theory of the origin of new species and which with its assumption of accidental variations, expressly disclaims the idea of purpose. Tacitus' favorite explanation of events is necessity or fate or destiny. To every one, in some mysterious way, is given one choice of life after which every thing is immutably fixed whether by the influence of the stars or by the sequence of natural causes. This doctrine which belongs both to astrology and Stoicism, being in fact the contribution of the former to the latter, played a great part in the ancient world, to say nothing of its reappearance in the all-pervading determinism of modern science. In giving the principle so much importance in the affairs of life Tacitus is a true inter

3 I am indebted here to Pöhlmann's die Weltanschaung des Tacitus.

4 Kellogg, Darwinism Today, pp. 13 and 375.