which their great merits are justly entitled to: but we propose employing them mainly as a text to authorize the expression of some remarks upon the character of the Roman people; and the relations which the civilization of Rome bore to the antecedent and subsequent periods of the world's

career.

ROME AND THE ROMANS! Such is our theme-and a noble theme it is. The very words fall like a spell upon the ear. They evoke from the dim shades of the past the warriors, the statesmen, the orators, the heroes, the mighty men and the great deeds, which have secured to the Roman people an immortality of fame. While they fail to excite the same warmth of attachment,-the same romantic interest, and enthusiastic love for the country,-that spring from the recollection of Greece; a graver, a more solemn, yet equally absorbing feeling, is produced by the mention of Rome. We are reminded of much that has been grandest in conception, greatest in daring, and noblest in execution, among men,-of the mightiest triumphs of human perseverance,the most brilliant glories of human energy. We would fain forget for a time the vices and the crimes which stained the rise of her dominion, the treachery, the corruption, the falsehood of the Republic,—the licentiousness and rottenness of her empire, the rapid decline and degradation of her modern history. We would fain overlook the broils and civil discords which, in her best days, preyed upon her vitals at home, the military despotism, oppression and extortion, which stained her career abroad,—and that religious tyranny over the minds of men, which for long centuries has been enthroned upon her venerable hills. Yet, even mingling together the varied elements of her history,-considering the virtues, the vices, and the follies of Rome,―we cannot think of her but with solemn awe and profound admiration. The memory of past grandeur is her ægis, with which she chills the heart of the sacrilegious beholder, so that we tread reverently over her ruins, as feeling that the soil beneath us is holy ground. Nor can we be weaned from our regard, even by the remembrance of her exactions and cruelties, her insatiable rapacity,-her lust of power and still greater lust of gold:-of the good men who have perished, and the wicked who have triumphed within her walls-of the blood of her conquered victims, and the still more sacred blood of the martyrs who have crimsoned her

streets and her amphitheatres, and made populous with death the vast catacombs beneath that mighty city.*

There is, indeed, no period in the history of Rome, that fails to produce the deepest interest. Unfold the long scroll of her eventful career,-trace her onward march as she advances, step by step, from the rude pastoral colony on the brow of the Palatine, till she has seized within her grasp the proud sceptre of universal dominion:-follow her course as the tides of fortune ebb from her shores, and leave her desolate on the strand, with the tribes of the earth,-late the unresisting victims of her insatiable ambition,-cursing, and reviling, and jeering at her, whose name had made the nations tremble:-see the imperial city of the Cæsars become the mock of the Goth and the spoil of the Vandal; till, in a subsequent age, the antique palaces of Roman greatness were quarried to furnish forth battlements for the petty strongholds of the feudal barons, or to build the clumsy structures of a barbarous age. During all her changes, Rome is secure of our most lively regard: and when, at length, the heightening stroke is given to her degradation and distress, by the lawless intrusion (in a civilized age) of the soldiery of Napoleon, we mourn over her desecrated temples and insulted Pontiff, with a deeper sympathy than we ever accorded to her triumphs. "How are the mighty fallen!" Alas! how changed is Rome from what she appeared to the Scipios and the Gracchi. Once the City of the World,the great city, which absorbed into itself the resources, the energies, the genius, and even the life of the habitable earththe city whose magistrates were above princes, whose consuls were above kings-the queen of cities, that looked forth from her throne of hills upon a subject world, and beheld all nations the fruits of her victories, or the tributaries of her renown: but now is she dwarfed, and the stream of her existence has dwindled, like her own golden Tiber, into a dull and sluggish current,-the diadem has been long reft from

* Michelet. Hist. Rep. Rom.-Int. c. 1. On the Catacombs of Rome, see Dr. Wiseman. Lectures on the Cath. church, vol. i., p. 86. Gieseler's Manual of Eccl. History, p. 169, and the authors there referred to. Lumisden's Antiquities of Rome, p. 96. They were not occupied, however, solely by the Christian martyrs.

+ Lumisden's Antiquities of Rome, p. 11-compare Bulwer's Rienzi. f Athenæus calls Rome-οὐρανόπολις Ρώμη-οἰκουμενης δήμος πόλις ἐπιτομὴ τῆς οἰκουμένης—ὁ σύμπας δῆμος τῆς οἰκουμένης. Deipn. 1, § 36.

her brows, the earth has swallowed up her crumbling ruins,*-the public places that echoed to the voice of Cicero, or hailed the legions of the triumphant consul, are in the dust, after having been the prey, the mock, the scorn of the despoiler. The rich campagna that Cincinnatus, and Fabricius, and Cato tilled, is now a waste.† Rome remains but as a skeleton, though grand and glorious in her ruin : but beneath her, and around her, all is a sepulchre,§ where the conqueror is entombed with the conquered.

The Niobe of nations! there she stands,

Childless and crownless in her voiceless wo;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless

Of their heroic dwellers: dost thou flow
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?

Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress!

The Goth, the Christian, time, war, flood and fire,
Have dealt upon the seven-hill'd city's pride;
She saw her glories star by star expire,
And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,
Where the car climb'd the capitol: far and wide
Temple and tower went down, nor left a site:
Chaos of ruins! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,

And say, "here was, or is," where all is doubly night?

The ragged minstrel gives but utterance to the general feeling, as he chaunts in the depopulated streets of Rome the melancholy wail:

Roma! Roma! Roma!
Non e piu come era prima!

With a feeling of deep gloom, produced by the contemplation of such uneven destinies, and yet of profound admiration for their colossal greatness, we enter upon the study

* Montaigne calls the ruins of Rome, in his day, "ces ruynes profondes jusques aux antipodes." Ess. liv. 3, c. ix.

+ Quoique Rome soit toujours une grande ville, le désert commence dans son enceinte même. Les renards que se cachent dans les ruines du Palatin, vout boire la nuit au Velabre," etc. Michelet. Hist. Rep. Rom. Int., c. i. A writer in a recent number of the United States Catholic Magazine, labors to disprove this, but, we think, without the slightest success.

"Sa ruyne même est glorieuse et enflée." Montaigne, Ess. liv. 3, c. ix. s "Rome," says Luther, "is merely a corpse and a heap of ashes." Cit. Michelet.

of the Roman people. Our attention will necessarily be confined to only a small portion of their long history. About seven hundred and fifty years are all that are given to the existence of Rome, anterior to the Christian era.* During more than half of this period every thing is uncertain; and the fabulous is so blended with the historical, that we cannot effectually separate the fiction from the truth. In carrying out our present design, we shall have principally to consider three points, each suggesting the others, and naturally connected with them;-the private and national character of the old Romans under the Republic;-the circumstances that conspired to impress that character upon them,—and the relation which they and their institutions bore to the general history of the human race. The magnitude of this undertaking does not escape our notice, we feel it to be "periculosa plenum opus alea,"-we tread with fear where Montesquieu failed, yet we are allured by the temptations which a subject so inviting presents, to attempt that which may as far transcend our abilities, as its due treatment would exceed our prescribed limits.

There is, perhaps, no other instance in the history of the world, in which the national character is so obviously mirrored in the individual life of its members, as in that of the Romans. The one was the reflex presentment of the other:

* There was a difference of one year between the results obtained by Cato and Varro. According to Varro, Rome was founded A. C. 753: according to Cato, A. C. 752. Before their time, the date of the foundation was wholly unknown. The nature of their calculations may be seen in Gregorie. De Er. and Ep. c. 8. Dr. Boyd, in an ingenious essay appended to his edition of Adams' Roman Antiquities, carries back the existence of Rome to a period anterior to the Trojan war. But there are many blunders in the Essay. On the origin of Rome, see Anthon's Classical Dict. Tit. Roma.

+ We may dismiss the history of Rome, previous to its capture by the Gauls, in the words of Livy on the same subject: "foris bella, domi seditiones," lib. vi., c. i., § 1. The greediness with which the Romans swallowed the fabricated legends of their early history, illustrates the profound and beautiful remark of the Theban poet:

ἦ θαυματὰ πολλὰ, καί πού τι καὶ βροτῶν φάτιν ὑπὲρ τὸν ἀλαθῆ λόγον δεδαιδαλμένοι φεύδεσι ποικίλοις ἐξαπατῶντι μῦθοι·

χάρις δ' ἅπερ ἅπαντα τεύχει τὰ μειλιχα θνατοῖς, ἐπιφέροισα τιμὰν, καὶ ἄπιστον ἐμήσατο πιστόν ἔμμεναι τοπολλάκις.

ἁμέραι δ' ἐπίλοιποι

μáρTUPES COPÚTATO. Pindar. Ol. i., vv. 28–34. Ed. Boëckhii.