Fronto, of Cirrha; and, on the death of Pertinax, the competitors for the purple were two born Africans, Postumus Albinus, who failed, being a native of Adrumetum, and Septimius Severus, who succeeded, being a native of Leptis.

Of the internal cultivation and condition of the Carthaginian territory we know only what Roman authors have told directly or indirectly. We know enough, however, to be assured that the city was environed for miles with parks, gardens, and country houses, of which the produce and the furniture afforded a rich booty to the soldiers of Regulus and the Scipios. Of the Roman Carthage we know even less; but even our scanty information, derived in great measure from the records of Cyril and Augustine, proves that the vicinity of the principal cities presented a wide and rich spectacle of cultivation and opulence.

The progress of Spain under imperial rule is not less remarkable. The tenants of Ravenswood, according to Caleb Balderstone, were a 'dour and fractious' set, who hardly obeyed their rightful masters, and to strangers were utterly recalcitrant. The Celts and Iberians were, Justin says, equally refractory. 'Bellum quam otium malunt: si extraneus deest, domi hostem quærunt.' The physical conformation of the Iberian peninsula favoured the stubbornness and restlessness-'inquies animus '-of its inhabitants; yet so thoroughly did Augustus curb and control these awkward customers, that for three centuries after his Cantabrian wars history has neither good nor bad marks in its book to the account of the Spaniards. They had become Romans. The schools established by Sertorius at Osca and Corduba for the Spanish youth bore good fruit.* At first the poets of Spain were clumsy and harsh in their verses: they wrote, as Southey's 'John Jones did, in language that savoured partly of Parnassus, and partly of the butler's pantry; but in time they took the lead in

*Plutarch, Sertorius.

VOL. LXVIII. NO. CCCCIII.

Roman literature, producing the Docti Seneca ter numeranda domus; Silius Italicus; Mela, the geographer; Quintilian, the Roman reviewer of literature in general; Florus, the historian; Martial, at once the laureate and the Punch of Rome; and an after-crop of Christian poets and prose writers, not always particular in respect of prosody or syntax. Nor did the land prosper less under Roman rule in agriculture and commerce than in all branches of learning. The Aqueduct of Calatrava still attests the attention bestowed by the Cæsars on the primal wants of its subjects; the olive, which, in the western world, followed the progress of peace, was carried by them into the heart of Spain; and Columella, in his elegant treatise, describes the advanced state of its husbandry under the reign of Tiberius. In the time of Vespasian, Pliny enumerates three hundred and sixty cities in the Iberian provinces. Some of these were probably walled villages, others inconsiderable market-towns; yet the sum of places, sufficiently important to be registered, proves that the country was more flourishing as a Roman province than it has been as a 'most Catholic' kingdom.

But the western provinces of the empire must not engross all our notice. It was easy enough, it may be said, to raise savages in the social scale, but how did the longcivilized East prosper under imperial rule? Why-to put into the comparative degree the phrase appropriated to ladies in the straweven better than could be expected.' Bating such occasional misfortunes as a professional visit from the imperial soprano-we beg pardon, the imperial basso, Nerosince his voice, according to Lucian, was—κοῖλον μὲν φύσει καὶ βαρὺhollow and husky-Greece, both north and south of the Isthmus, prospered exceedingly. Corinth, which the senatorian ruffian, Mummius, had brought down to the condition of Old Sarum, had risen, since it was colonized by Julius Cæsar, into

† Cicero, pro Archia.

H

a Grecian Liverpool. Athens, no longer, indeed, Queen of the Isles of Greece, flourished as a university, and its professors and lodginghouse keepers derived perennially no small profit from fees and rent paid by the studious youth of Italy. The Thessalian and Macedonian Icities had their full share of the blessings of peace; the cheesemarket of Larissa was thronged like that of Chester at the present time; and Amphipolis and Thessalonica delighted the traveller with their baths and amphitheatres, and the merchant with their rich supplies of Thessalian wool and Thracian bullocks. If we cross the Hellespont and survey Asia within Taurus, we encounter similar tokens of prosperity; while, at Tarsus, we find a city almost rivalling Athens, Berytus, or Marseilles, in the fame and fullness of its university. Nor had the capitals of Syria and Egypt cause to regret the absence of their native monarchs. The kingdoms no longer warred against each other: they were not, indeed, exempt from civil broils; for both Syrians and Egyptians were an evil-tongued and sharptempered race, and at times fell out among themselves about their games or their gods, or with the Romans when the tax-gatherers were importunate. These, however, were passing storms; and Antioch profited greatly by its broad roads to the East, and by the demand for its_silks, its pottery and hardware; and Alexandria throve comfortably upon its corn trade, and by the numerous products of a city in which, Hadrian remarked, 'no one -not even those who were crippled by gout, or afflicted with blindness -was idle.**

Of the benefits which the provincials derived from the substitution of one master for many we hear little from Tacitus. He intimates indeed that the subjects of Rome acquiesced in the establishment of monarchy,† and he admits that Tiberius was, beyond the neighbourhood of his

capital, a just and even a considerate ruler. The historian's eyes were fixed on a much smaller circle of objects than those which the vast orb of the provinces presented to him. Had he studied Gaul, or Spain, or Syria, with half the attention he bestowed on the Germans, we should have been better able than we are to describe the internal condition of the empire. Tacitus, however, cared as little for the subjects of Rome as the senate had cared in the worst days of proconsular government. As a professional orator he thundered against the corruptions and the cruelty of Marius, but of the 'weeping province,' whose cause he gained, he took little heed.‡ The covert opposition between the party, still dreaming of a republic, and the Cæsar, wakefully guarding against a restoration of it, absorbed his political interest. He had indeed little reason to approve of the established order of things. Many of the best years of his manhood were passed under the sullen and capricious tyranny of Domitian. In that dark epoch it was dangerous to write or to speak freely: nay, so liable was his majesty to fits of passion, over and above his chronic jealousy of the senatorian order, that it was not always safe to talk to him about the universal topic of the weather. To one who cannot have been unconscious of his gift of eloquence, and who had certainly studied rhetoric with no ordinary diligence, the necessity for silence must have been irritating in the highest degree. He could not dig, and to beg he was ashamed. He was too honest and humane to turn delator; he was too proud to curry favour with Domitian by paying such compliments as Martial and Statius lavished upon him. He took him as a sample of the twelve Cæsars, and he has accordingly dipped his pen in gall thoughout his narrative of their administration. The republican bias of Tacitus is most apparent in his Annals; but his dissatisfaction with his own times peeps

His

out in all he wrote. The Life of Agricola is a scarcely disguised protest against the base and crouching nobles who permitted a lowborn and brutal tyrant to shed the blood or to seal the lips of better and braver men than himself. Germany, though the modern employment of it is for ethnological purposes, is really a satire on the vices of the writer's contemporaries little less bitter than Juvenal's indignant verse. He finds in barbarians virtues incompatible with their social condition, in order that he may throw into stronger relief the prodigality, effeminacy, and sloth of Rome. And if he wrote, as he probably did write, the treatise on the Corruptions of Eloquence, he exhibits in that dialogue a similar vein of discontent.

So little is known of one who has rendered so many persons familiar to us, that we are unable to say whether Tacitus came of a good house, or whether, as his name may import, his tritavus, or great-greatgrandfather, were a client or freedman of the Cornelian family. If he were fourth in descent from some dependent of the great Cornelius Sulla, his aristocratical prejudices may have been bequeathed to him with his lares and his chattels, since Roman politics were hereditary, as Whig and Tory politics used to be in England before the present confusion of party tongues scattered the builders of the ministerial tower. That the associations, if not the connections of Tacitus were with the old aristocracy is evident.

He

writes as if he were living in Cicero's republic and not under Trajan's imperium. He is therefore, if he be implicitly trusted, likely to mislead us in our estimate of these respective periods, more especially, since by very general, if not universal consent, he is taken for Sir Oracle' in all matters relating to the Cæsarian period. And this prejudice in his favour is greatly strengthened by what appears to be the corroboration of Suetonius. But as regards this often picturesque, and always entertaining biographer, we have a slight demurrer to put in. What should we think of a

biographer of George III. who had relied for his facts entirely on the family papers of the great Whig families of the time, and for his opinions on the North Briton and Junius's Letters? Would our faith be increased if he seasoned such vouchers with a quantum suff. of Peter Pindar or a few grains of Byron's Vision of Judgment? Again, with what sort of reputation might the good Dr. Arnold be clad at this moment, had Dr. Stanley thought fit to poach in the mud of the old John Bull newspaper, or taken on trust some of the assertions of the Quarterly Review? But on this, or on some very similar plan, Suetonius went while collecting materials for his Lives of the Twelve Caesars. On any other supposition than that of a voracious appetite and a bad digestion, his collectanea of gossip are inexplicable. With him every one of the dozen is in some respects monstrum horrendum informe. To have been a lunatic like Caligula, or an idiot like Claudius, was to 'stand in some rank of praise:' but to be a Cæsar at all was to be a usurper whom the gods endured, because they were indifferent to mankind, and whom men suffered to existgrande patientiae documentum-because they were weak and therefore miserable. But whatever Tacitus may have been, Suetonius in his historical writings had in him as little of the philosopher as Robert Southey himself. He was a bookworm. His days were passed in the muniment rooms of the capitol. He had access to the family papers and journals of the nobles. But he could never turn his eyes upon the provinces, and even if he did, was incapable of seeing that the empire was the inevitable, and in most respects, the natural complement of the republic. It is sometimes urged in behalf of Tacitus, that his portraits are so consistent as to bear the stamp of truth, or at least of the highest degree of probability; that he lived sufficiently near the times he delineates to command authentic information; and that his official rank and his fame for eloquence rendered every kind of information, oral, written, or traditional, accessible to

him. In the first place, we deny that his sketches of the Cæsars are as consistent as they are said to be. Did space permit, we could prove that his character of Tiberius is a contradiction; that much of his account of Claudius and Nero will not bear scrutiny. On these inconsistencies in Tacitus, M. DuboisGuchan has written what is well worth reading, and to his pages we refer the reader. Secondly, as regards contemporaneity or approximation to the age which he describes, we admit these advantages, but remember also that, however they may impart vigour and animation to a narrative, they are no guarantees for truth. Do we take on trust whatever Burnet or Clarendon found it convenient to set down? Sallust was contemporary with Cicero, but in his version of the conspiracy the great orator plays a secondary part. What if Tacitus used such colours only as befitted the Rembrandt gloom of his portraits? What if, in order to point his sarcastic epigrams the more finely, he has suppressed things that would have given, if he had included them, quite a different turn to the action he brands? We submit these considerations to the student of this great, but, in our opinion, not immaculate historian.

The determination to view the Cæsars through the spectacles of Tacitus is shown in the neglect of an earlier writer of history, contemporary with Augustus and Tiberius, and who had the best opportunities for observing them. He had passed through inferior grades in the legions-tribune of the soldiers, tribune of the camp-when in A.D. 2, he was appointed prefect of the cavalry, equivalent nearly to our general of brigade. He served eight years under Tiberius, in Germany, Pannonia, and Dalmatia, and was nominated for the prætorship by Augustus in the year 14. But what is most important to our purpose is, the general impartiality and ability of his abridgment of Roman

history. One manuscript only of this work existed in the sixteenth century, and that has since disappeared. We are consequently scarcely entitled to find occasional faults with his style, since the manuscript is known to have been imperfect, and was most probably corrupt. Even the style, however, exhibits power and practice in composition of no ordinary kind, and it is pleasant to find that in the Roman, no less than in the British army, there were officers of highly cultivated minds and great literary talents. Perhaps a clinamen towards reading and study had been insinuated into the camp by the mighty leader in the Roman revolution, the all-accomplished Julius. But because Tacitus has limned Tiberius as a 'dark, intelligencing tyrant,' and Sejanus, undoubtedly a minister of no common ability, as one of evil 'all-compact,' the evidence of Velleius in their favour is refused a hearing, and he is set down among the empty and inflated panegyrists who greeted each new Cæsar as a 'tertius Cato,' and hailed his opening reign as a golden age.

We have touched on a few of the questions which M. Dubois-Guchan handles at great length and with much ability. Had he not glanced at Paris in the nineteenth century while he was treating of Rome in the first and second, we should have greeted his volumes with unmixed satisfaction. As it is, it forms a useful commentary on the great historian whose character and times it surveys. We should gladly welcome a work of similar kind, exempt from modern bias, from one of the scholars whom Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin now ranks among their viri clarissimi. We surely have had enough of mere grammar and prosody from these learned sisters, and may fairly expect from them, in consideration of their means and opportunities, a little attention to ancient literature and history on the scale, if not after the pattern, of Tacite et son Siècle.

W. B. D.

The moral and intellectual con any close observer of society, dition of the young in the present day is not the least remarkable peculiarity of our age. But although laughing comments upon some of the ungraceful follies they exhibit are common enough, the subject seems hardly to attract as much interest as it deserves. All who are practically engaged in education must, of course, study the condition of the young mind, as a matter of individual concern; but as a matter of public interest, we seem hardly awake to the deep national importance of the mental condition of the rising generation. It is not that the young are little considered: we have yearly debates upon popular education; we have competitive examinations, and University Reform Commissions; but in all these the point in question is the amount of knowledge necessary to be given for the practical purposes of life in various classes and positions; they regard the future, while the condition of those now entering upon the practical duties of life does not enter into these discussions. But it is this actual condition to which existing systems have brought the young of our own day; it is the evidence which they are giving of their power to cope with the great problems of society; the prospect they hold out to us of future national good or evil, which appear to us to engage little attention. Yet to those who consider it, the mental condition of the young at the present moment offers many strange peculiarities which cannot be without effect upon character in maturer years, nor therefore without influence on the social and political life of the nation, on its opinions, its literature, and on the training of a future generation. Surely such manifestations are worth attention.

In endeavouring to explain and account for some of them, we will for the present look at the upper classes alone. Any wider survey becomes too complicated, and lets

in too many other questions of social relations, which puzzle the inquiry, and render it more difficult to trace the peculiarities to their source. Even in this narrower field there is more than enough to perplex, if not to baffle the observer.

The first thing that strikes one in mixing with young people now is the absence of that diffidence or timidity which has been supposed to belong to inexperience. There is in them generally, though in different degrees, what in the few may be called self-possession, but in the many must be called self-assurance. Afraid of nothing, abashed at nothing, astonished at nothing, they are ever comfortably assured of their own perfect competence to do or say the right thing in any given position. In schools, in universities, in military colleges, or in the world, wherever the young are assembled, these peculiarities are more or less conspicuous. Nor are they confined to the male sex alone. A girl of eighteen goes with as much assurance to her first drawing-room as the boy just out of school goes to meet his first introduction to his professional superiors. Their elders remember such days as momentous periods of agitation or nervous shyness, and accompany their hopeful offspring with words of encouragement; while, in truth, it is more probable that the daughter will support her mother's diffidence, and the son kindly patronize his father in the forthcoming trial to their nerves. One fear alone would be capable of unnerving either. the youth could imagine that his companions suspected him of any of the poor-spirited qualities which are summed up under the awful accusation of being 'green;' if the young lady who last week exchanged school-room frocks for ballroom dresses, could suppose that any one would doubt her perfect knowledge of life and society, of all proprieties of dress, manners, and conduct, then, indeed, a cloud might come over their mental serenity, and that grand repose of

If