A short thick man, with sleek head wiry-gray, Or copy' with 'original' compares; A sneaking, dauntless man, who disregards A thin keen watchful man and some few more A certain case admits of-not one day. Let Jemmy Burke go home; there's higher game 'If we're for action, there's no time to lose. Well said, my boys! for though the hazard's great, The ball's with Pigot if we hesitate. They came to Lisnamoy, but don't go home (To be continued.) TACITUS AND HIS TIMES.* O the credit of foreign scholars, tions, both as regards past and The one point to Tand those of France especially, present times. it must be admitted that their essays on classical literature exhibit a much more practical and lively spirit than is commonly to be met with in the volumes issued by the Pitt or Clarendon Press. Scarcely a work much supposed evil, the others to much imaginary good in the Cæsarian régime. Credit is taken for efficient government where it is not due, or withheld where it is. It is rashly assumed that circumstances ap actually alike; that because nineteen centuries ago a central bond and key-stone were wholesome, if not indispensable, for the world of the Cæsars, the wide arch of modern Europe now once again requires the same, or at least a similar tie. It is asserted with equal confidence that the empire, as inaugurated by Julius and confirmed by Trajan, was uncalled for, since the Commonwealth, though disorganized, was still a living force, or an effective machine for the administration of provinces that stretched from the Euphrates to the Western Ocean, from the cataracts of the Nile to the Firth of Clyde. proceeds from either which, how-parently similar demand treatment ever sound in doctrine, is not afflicted with the unpardonable sin of dulness. We have no wish to abrogate for theology its privilege to be somniferous, or to quarrel with editors of Greek plays for preferring the mint and cummin of new readings and metrical experiments to the poetical or classical beauties of the Attic drama. Of English editors of Horace and Juvenal we have long despaired. The wittiest of the Augustan poets has for generations been handed over to antichrists of wit. The eloquent censor of Domitian and of Roman follies and luxury has, since the days of Gifford, either been neglected, or annotated by men as insensible to his genius as they were ignorant of the causes and objects of his satire. We have many learned and many accurate scholars in either University, but few apparently who have the power or the inclination to treat ancient literature as M. Guillaume Guizot has treated Menander and the new comedy, or M. Merimée certain portions of Roman history, or the Comte de Champagny and, more recently, M. Dubois-Guchan the times and character of the Cæsars. Our Bentleys and Porsons have thrown all their learning into the channel of philology. On the other hand, so far as regards Roman history, we have frequently to lament that it is used by foreign scholars as a vehicle for their opinions on modern politics. In the Roman Cæsardom the foes or friends of modern imperialism discover or create analogies with the object of their applause or aversion, which lead to grave misrepresenta From this defect the work of M. Dubois-Guchan is not exempt; indeed, we could hardly select a more striking instance of the evil arising from such a confusion of eras. Before, however, we point out where his political theory or bias has misled him, we must briefly state the scope and compass of his learned and really instructive work on Tacitus and his Age. First, then, he passes under review the components of Roman society in the properly Cæsarian age. His volumes are a minute account of the period which Gibbon epitomizes in his first three chapters. The army, the senate, and the people are carefully scrutinized; literature, philosophy, and religion have each their chapters appropriated to them; the intricate machinery of the Roman police-system is set before us; and that peculiar adjunct to it-that terrible implement in the hands of the Cæsarsthe right or the custom of Delation, * Tacite et son Siècle; ou, la Société Romaine Impériale d'Auguste aux Antonins dans ses Rapports avec la Société Moderne. Par E. P. Dubois-Guchan, Procureur Impérial à Nantes. 2 tomes. 8vo. Paris: Didier et Cie. 1861. receives much attention, and, indeed, much indirect applause. The provinces are surveyed, and the quarters from which the empire might often apprehend danger, and which it must always jealously watch-the northern nations on the one side, the Parthian monarchy on the other-are presented to us at the point of view from which they were regarded by Augustus and his successors. Lastly, when the Orbis Romanus has been travelled over, the historian himself is brought forward, and examined as to his fitness for representing the Cæsars and their system. With many of these chapters we have no fault to find; they give a just and a lively picture of the times, and furnish an admirable commentary on the great annalist. M. Dubois-Guchan, however, sometimes demands of his readers a measure of approbation or of faith which, for ourselves, we cannot accord. 'Mediolani mira omnia :' all may have been so at Milan; but there are limits to our acquiescence with the admirable system of Rome. We will take his view of the Delators for our example of M. DuboisGuchan's disposition to colour in rosy hues an order of things which, so long as it lasted, was virtually a ' reign of terror.' The right which every citizen under the Commonwealth possessed to pick out and impeach some political or personal opponent was an accident arising out of the provincial system. For a while, it was by no means an unsalutary, though it was a clumsy or capricious mode of correcting abuses. Justice, pure and simple, was not its object; it was a political weapon, which party wielded for its immediate ends. The thunder-bolts which Cicero hurled at Verres were not forged on the anvil of grief or sympathy for the people of Sicily, but upon that of enmity towards the oligarchy. The novus homo was excluded from its narrow circle, and he determined to break down its barriers. Had Cicero truly felt the wrongs which he denounced, he would not have defended the equally guilty Fontrius, nor debated whether he should plead for the notorious criminal Lucius Catilina. But the Agamemnonida, the proud lords of the senate, were vulnerable through Verres, and accordingly the Hastings of Rome was excoriated by the Roman Burke. In a State in which arms, eloquence, or a long purse were the only avenues to prætorian or consular chairs, he who was neither a soldier nor a capitalist could raise himself only by success at the bar; and, indeed, so essential was eloquence even to the man of the sword, or to him who counted ancestral feats and trophies by scores, or who held in fee manors scarcely less extensive than some English counties, that we find Cæsar himself opening his career by a political impeachment. The storms of the forum were hushed by the voice of Augustus; imperceptibly all power was withdrawn from the faex Romuli, the hybrid paupers of the city, and transferred to the Senate, and the privilege or the practice of Delation went with it. The Cæsar, among his various and discordant functions, being perpetual Tribune, had become the embodied concrete of the people; what the Lex Majestatis had defined to be an offence against the nation was ruled, under Tiberius, to be an offence against the Princeps; and those who aspired to his favour vied with one another in guarding his sacred person from real or imaginary danger. The senatorian party had accepted Julius and Augustus as sad necessities of the time, as their bulwarks against the power of the legions or the envy and tumult of the democracy. But neither the first nor the second Cæsar ever gained the hearts of the nobles, and when their dignity was enhanced and their authority augmented by becoming the sole depositaries of legislative functions, the impatience of the aristocracy under Cæsarian predominancy became more and more intense. From the age of Augustus to that of Severus, the Cæsardom affected a civil demeanour-civil in the Roman sense of the term-that is to say, the head of the army veiled his imperatorial strength behind the convenient fiction of Prince of the Senate and Tribune of the People. He was not the less an absolute monarch because he affected to be a constitutional one; but the Senate were not blind to the imposition, and openly or secretly murmured at their subjection to an equal or an inferior citizen. At any moment Tiberius might have suppressed the Senate, as Cromwell suppressed the Long Parliament. But he did not choose to put on the scarlet paludament, and display himself in all his imperial terrors; he preferred the mixed character of master of the legions and first of the senators. But his position was undefined, and therefore insecure. "Who is this Claudius Nero,' it was whispered, 'that we, Fabii, Manlii, and Cornelii, should for ever bend the knee to him? His sires and ours were equally servants of the State-drove their triumphal chariots up the Capitoline Hill, filled the treasury, and carried forward the eagles towards the rising and the setting sun,' It was by means of the Delators that the disaffected were held in check, that they were divided and rendered distrustful of one another; while the Cæsar, following the policy of Tarquin, marked and struck off the heads that towered above the rest, or even those who had pretensions so to exalt themselves. M. Dubois-Guchan sees in this institution much to approve, and looks upon the Delators, on the whole, as useful members of society. Was it not, he thinks, expedient, and even just, that he who cared for the world should himself also be cared for? Should there not be persons deputed to taste the Emperor's mullets and venison, lest his cook might have been tampered with, to guard against the butlers doctoring his particular Falernian, and to see that ill-disposed persons did not bring to his levées daggers or styli, so easy to hide in the folds of their gowns? Were not the senators who cried All hail to Tiberius!' sons and grandsons of the men who had rendered the Ides of March as black a day in the calendar as the anniversaries of the Cremera and the Allia? Had not the lenient Augustus, who had pardoned Egnatius and Murena for plotting against his life, pointed out, on his deathbed, to his successor certain men on whom it would be well for him to keep an eye? Look sharp, my son,' said the dying lion,' after that Marcus Lepidus: he does not want to be emperor, but he would make a good one; after yon Gallus Asinius: blockhead as he is, he would like to stand in your sandals; after that, Lucius Arruntius: he bears a brain, and is an arrant grumbler, and has in his head some cursed old-fashioned notions about liberty and country.' And did not his son take the hint, and shorten by a head two of the three?* From the unwashed denizens of the Velabrum and Suburra there was little to dread, so long as they had enough to eat and enough to stare at in the circus or the theatre. That Faubourg St. Antoine had its innings in the days of Sulpicius and Milo; the Red Republic had been made by successive depletions as harmless as a sheep; but as to the Senate, every third man on its benches was in heart an Orsini. Such is nearly M. DuboisGuchan's form of apology for the wholesome institution of government watchmen. The contemporaries of Tacitus thought differently; so did the generation before them; so did the better sort of emperors. Nothing rendered an incoming Cæsar so popular as packing off delators by ship-loads, and not always in seaworthy vessels, to the islands of the Egean, the penal settlements of Rome, there to inform, if they listed, against the sea-mews and eagles of the rock. It is impossible to avoid seeing that, in his favourable notice of this abhorred class of men, the author has in his eye the active and iniquitous police of the French empire. Nearly half of the second volume of Tacite et son Temps is occupied with the literature and literary *Tacitus, Annal. i. 13. phenomena of the empire, and in these chapters M. Dubois-Guchan appears to great advantage. The contrast between the rigour with which the Senate was treated, and the freedom permitted to writers and, in certain cases, to speakers also, amounts almost to a practical paradox. Poets, historians, and philosophers were suffered to celebrate in their books the virtue of Cato, the devotion of Brutus, and the patriotism of Cicero; the rhetoricians in the schools enjoyed an equal privilege of declaiming against tyrants, and of lauding tyrannicides. To what cause are we to ascribe this excessive vigilance on the one hand, this excessive laxity on the other? Why should a Cæsar be so afraid of the supreme judicial council of the realm, and be at the same time so indifferent to what books and declaimers said of him? We must remember, in order to dive into this mystery, that on the one hand the Senate was a well-organized body; that it was connected with a numerous body of clients and dependents; that it could arm myriads of slaves; that it held a vast amount of colonial property, and was inspired by a very general hatred to the person or the position of the Princeps. It was only by dividing this formidable estate, by buying up some, by intimidating others, that the Princeps, unless he threw himself absolutely upon the army, had a chance of retaining his authority, of eating or sleeping in security. The spectre of the Commonwealth stood beside his consular chair, and stalked through his palaces. A few senators, without any party in the forum, and without any influence with the legions, had struck down, at broad noon-day, the favourite of the people and the army, the patron of the provinces, the bravest, the most brilliant, the most accomplished man in the Roman world. If the mighty Julius had been vulnerable, what could a gloomy Claudius expect? If Augustus, who stood between anarchy and welcome repose, had been fain more than once to wear a breastplate beneath his gown when he sat among the conscript fathers, what steadfast security could Caligula, Nero, or Domitian reasonably look for? But literature and its professors presented no similar terrors, no organized unity-little less terrible to the imperial mind. Now and then, indeed, a single victim, like Cremutius Cordus, was picked out, 'pour encourager les autres,' as a gentle hint to his confraternity that it were better to speak less pointedly in praise of Brutus and Cassius; now and then it was necessary to strangle a philosopher, or bid him open his veins and go into a hot bath of his own accord, if he liked not the rude grasp of a centurion. But if the instances of this kind be examined closely, we shall generally find that the obnoxious writer was more or less in league with a party or with individuals whom the Princeps had reason to know meant him no good. It is just possible that Seneca may have bored, with his 'wise saws and modern instances,' his imperial pupil beyond endurance; it is equally likely that the philosopher had a guilty knowledge of Piso's conspiracy. Lucan, again, was an undoubted plotter, and Nero owed him an old grudge for having written better verses than Torva mimalloneis implerunt cornua bombis; and when the same Cæsar 'slew. virtue herself in the person of Thrasea,' he probably dreaded his character more than his books. In general, however, a literary man in Rome might say or write what he pleased. Against lampoons that no Christian sovereign would pass over without replying to them by his attorney-general, the Cæsars presented the hide of a rhinoceros; Julius asked Catullus to supper after reading an epigram on himself that would have kindled inappeasable wrath in Charles the Second; and even Tiberius, tristissimus hominum, of all men in the world the least capable of relishing inconvenient jesting, bade the Senate not to take note of what idle or malicious scribblers said of him. In fact, the literary class at Rome was small in number and inconsiderable in weight. It was a coterie-a Kitkat or an October club-having its pamphlets, its songs, its toasts, and |