open a new era. The doctrine of human sacrifice, which had exerted so strange and growing a fascination, was to lose its horrors while retaining its ennobling influence. The emotions and the conscience were reconciled when God Himself became his own victim.

SOCIETY IN ITALY IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC.

WHETHER free free institutions create good citizens, or whether conversely free institutions imply good citizens and wither up and perish as private virtue decays, is a question which will continue to be agitated as long as political society continues. The science of history ought to answer it, but the science of history is silent or ambiguous where, if it could tell us anything at all, it would be able to speak decidedly. What is called the philosophy of history is, and can be, only an attempted interpretation of earlier ages by the modes of thought current in our own; and those modes of thought, being formed by the study of the phenomena which are actually round us, are changed from era to era. We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters. Those who have studied most conscientiously the influences which have determined their own convictions will be the last to claim exemption from the control of forces which they recognise as universal and irresistible. The foreground of human life is the only part of it which we can examine with real exactness. As the distance recedes details disappear in the shade, or resolve themselves into outlines. We turn to contemporary books and records, but we lose in light and in connection with present experience what

we gain in minuteness.

The accounts of their own times

which earlier writers leave to us are coloured in turn by their opinions, and we cannot so reproduce the past as to guard against prejudices which governed those writers as much as they govern ourselves. The result, even to the keenest historical sight, is no more than a picture which each of us paints for himself upon the retina of his own imagination.

These conditions of our nature warn us all, if we are wise, against generalised views of history. We form general views. This, too, we cannot help, unless we are ignorant of the past altogether. But we receive them for what they are worth. They do not repose upon a knowledge of facts which can form the foundations of a science. We see certain objects; but we see them not as they were, but fore-shortened by distance and coloured by the atmosphere of time. The impression, before it arrives in our minds, has been half created by ourselves. Therefore it is that from philosophy of history, from attempts to explain the phenomena of earlier generations by referring them to general principles, we turn with weariness and distrust. We find more interest in taking advantage of those rare occasions where we can apply a telescope to particular incidents, and catch a sight of small fractions of the actual doings of our fellow-mortals, where accident enables us to examine them in detailed pattern. We may obtain little in this way to convince our judgment, but we can satisfy an innocent curiosity, and we can sometimes see enough to put us on our guard against universal conclusions.

We know, for instance (so far as we can speak of knowledge of the general character of an epoch), that the early commonwealth of Rome was distinguished by remarkable purity of manners; that the marriage tie was

singularly respected; that the Latin yeomen who were the backbone of the community were industrious and laborious, that they lived with frugality and simplicity, and brought up their children in a humble fear of God or of the gods as rulers to whom they would one day have to give an account. That the youth of a plant which grew so sturdily was exceptionally healthy is no more than we should naturally infer, and that the fact was so is confirmed to us both by legend and authentic record. The change of manners is assumed by some persons to have come in with the Cæsars. Virtue is supposed to have flourished so long as liberty survived, and the perfidy and profligacy of which we read with disgust in Tacitus and Juvenal are regarded as the offspring of despotism. With the general state of European morals under the first centuries of the Empire we are extremely ill-acquainted. Tacitus and Juvenal describe the society of the capital. Of life in the country and in the provincial towns they tell us next to nothing. If we may presume that the Messalinas had their imitators in the provinces; if we may gather from the Epistles of St. Paul that the morals of Corinth for instance were not distinguished by any special excellence, yet there was virtue or desire of virtue enough in the world to make possible the growth of Christianity.

Accident, on the other hand, has preserved the fragments of a drama of real life, which was played out in the last days of the Republic, partly in Rome itself, partly in a provincial city in South Italy, from which it would appear that the ancient manners were already everywhere on the decline; that institutions suited to an age when men were a law to themselves, could not prevent them from becoming wicked if they were inclined, and only saved them from punishment when they had deserved it. The broken pieces of the story leave much to be desired.

names.

The actions are preserved; the actors are little more than The flesh and blood, the thoughts that wrought in the brain, the passions that boiled in the veins-these are dry as the dust of a mummy from an Egyptian catacomb. Though generations pass away, however, the earth at least remains. We cannot see the old nations, but we can stand where they stood; we can look on the landscape on which they looked; we can watch the shadows of the clouds chasing one another on the same mountain slopes; we can listen to the everlasting music of the same waterfalls; we can hear the same surf far off lapping upon the beach.

Let us transport ourselves then to the Neapolitan town of Larino, not far from the Gulf of Venice. In the remains of the amphitheatre we can recognise the Roman hands that once were labouring there.

Let us imagine that it is the year 88 before Christ, when Cæsar was a boy of twelve, when the Social War had just been ended by Sylla, and Marius had fled from Rome, to moralise amidst the ruins of Carthage. Larino, like most of the Samnite towns, had taken part with the patriots. Several of its most distinguished citizens had fallen in battle. They had been defeated, but their cause had survived. Summoned to Asia to oppose Mithridates, Sylla had postponed his revenge, and had conceded at least some of the objects for which the Italians had been in arms. The leaders returned to their homes, and their estates escaped confiscation. The two families of highest consequence in Larino were the Cluentii and the Aurii. Both were in mourning. Lucius Cluentius, who had commanded the insurgent army in Campania, had been killed at Nola. Marcus Aurius had not returned to Larino at the peace, and was supposed to have fallen in the North of Italy. Common political sympathies had drawn the