1. Reflections on the Sufferings of the Roman Commons after the Retreat of the Gauls.

In

BUT the prospect at home was not overclouded merely; it was the very deepest darkness of misery. It has been well said that long periods of general suffering make far less impression on our minds, than the short sharp struggle in which a few distinguished individuals perish; not that we over-estimate the horror and the guilt of times of open bloodshedding, but we are much too patient of the greater misery and greater sin of periods of quiet legalized oppression; of that most deadly of all evils, when law, and even religion herself, are false to their divine origin and purpose, and their voice is no longer the voice of God, but of his enemy. such cases the evil derives advantage, in a manner, from the very amount of its own enormity. No pen can record, no volume can contain, the details of the daily and hourly sufferings of a whole people, endured without intermission, through the whole life of man, from the cradle to the grave. The mind itself can scarcely comprehend the wide range of the mischief: how constant poverty and insult, long endured as the natural portion of a degraded caste, bear with them to the sufferers something yet worse than pain, whether of the body or the feelings; how they dull the understanding and poison the morals; how ignorance and ill-treatment combined are the parents of universal suspicion; how from oppression is produced habitual cowardice, breaking out when occasion offers into merciless cruelty; how slaves become naturally liars; how they, whose condition denies them all noble enjoyments, and to whom looking forward is only despair, plunge themselves with a brute's recklessness, into the lowest sensual pleasures; how the domestic circle

itself, the last sanctuary of human virtue, becomes at length corrupted, and in the place of natural affection and parental care, there is to be seen only selfishness and unkindness, and no other anxiety on the part of the parents for their children, than that they may, by fraud or by violence, prey in their turn upon that society which they have found their bitterest enemy. Evils like these, long working in the heart of a nation, render their own cure impossible: a revolution may execute judgment on one generation, and that perhaps the very one which was beginning to see and to repent of its inherited sins; but it cannot restore life to the morally dead; and its ill success, as if in this line of evils no curse should be wanting, is pleaded by other oppressors as a defence of their own iniquity, and a reason for perpetuating it for ever.

A MIND like Scipio's, working its way under the peculiar influences of his time and country, cannot but move irregularly; it cannot but be full of contradictions. Two hundred years later, the mind of the dictator Cæsar acquiesced contentedly in Epicureanism: he retained no more of enthusiasm than was inseparable from the intensity of his intellectual power, and the fervour of his courage, even amidst his utter moral degradation. But Scipio could not be like Cæsar. His mind rose above the state of things around him; his spirit was solitary and kingly; he was cramped by living among those as his equals, whom he felt fitted to guide as from some higher sphere; and he retired at last to Liternum to breathe freely, to enjoy the simplicity of childhood, since he could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero king. So far he stood apart from his countrymen, admired, reverenced, but not loved. But he

could not shake off all the influences of his time; the virtue, public and private, which still existed at Rome, the reverence paid by the wisest and best men to the religion of their fathers, were elements too congenial to his nature, not to retain their hold on it: they cherished that nobleness of soul in him, and that faith in the invisible and divine, which two centuries of growing unbelief rendered almost impossible in the days of Cæsar. Yet how strange must the conflict be, when faith is combined with the highest intellectual power, and its appointed object is no better than Paganism! Longing to believe, yet repelled by palpable falsehood, crossed inevitably with snatches of unbelief, in which hypocrisy is ever close at the door, it breaks out desperately, as it may seem, into the region of dreams and visions, and mysterious communings with the invisible, as if longing to find that food in its own creations, which no outward objective truth offers to it. The proportions of belief and unbelief in the human mind in such cases, no human judgment can determine: they are the wonders of history; characters inevitably misrepresented by the vulgar, and viewed even by those who in some sense have the key to them as a mystery, not fully to be comprehended, and still less explained to others. The genius which conceived the incomprehensible character of Hamlet, would alone be able to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio or of Cromwell.

3. The Treasures of History.

ENOUGH has been said, I think, to show that history contains no mean treasures: that as being the biography of a nation, it partakes of the richness and variety of those elements which make up a nation's life. Whatever

there is of greatness in the final cause of all human thought and action, God's glory and man's perfection, that is the measure of the greatness of history. Whatever there is of variety and intense interest in human nature, -in its elevation, whether proud as by nature or sanctified as by God's grace; in its suffering, whether blessed or unblessed, a martyrdom or a judgment; in its strange reverses, in its varied adventures, in its yet more varied powers, its courage and its patience, its genius and its wisdom, its justice and its love, that also is the measure of the interest and variety of history. The treasures indeed are ample; but we may more reasonably fear whether we may have strength and skill to win them.

LIX.

THOMAS BABINGTON LORD MACAULAY.

1800-1859.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born in 1800, and died in 1859.

He early became eminent both as a politician and as a writer. He entered Parliament in 1830, was a member of the Legislative Council of India from 1834 to 1838, and twice after his return to England (1839 and 1847) sat in the Cabinet. He was raised to the Peerage in 1857.

His main literary works are his History of England, his Essays, and his Lays of Rome. The History, of which four volumes were published during his lifetime (1848-55), and one after his death, is merely a fragment of the work he had intended to produce.

Macaulay's style is the perfection of clearness. Not an ambiguous sentence is to be found throughout his works. His writings are distinguished by great vigour, and are rendered attractive, even when dealing with subjects dry in themselves, by pointed antithesis and by profuse illustration.

His style alone would have insured his popularity, but his success as a writer was increased by other causes. From the circumstances of his life, he wrote of politics, and especially of English politics, with the advantage rarely possessed by modern literary men, of having taken an active part in public life. Hence he writes of English history with a knowledge and sympathy which cannot be gained merely from books. He had the art of clothing in the most brilliant language the views generally prevalent in his time. His opinions were almost always the opinions