away; Cæsar's Empire fell for a moment, but it had strength enough to rise again under his adopted son, and to live on, we may almost say, till the present hour. The other Dictator has left no such memorials before our eyes and ears; no month is called Cornelius, no modern potentate calls himself Sulla as his proudest title. But this is not all: the real difference lies much deeper. Cæsar, with all his crimes and vices, had a heart. He was a man of battles, but not a man of proscriptions. He was a warm friend and a generous enemy.* In one point of view, Sulla's was the wiser policy. Sulla never spared or forgave, and he died in his bed; Cæsar forgave, and he died by the daggers of those whom he had forgiven. Most men indeed would choose the bloody death of Cæsar-a death which admirers might call martyrdom—rather than the foul and lingering disease of Sulla. But there is the fact; the merciful conqueror died by violence, the wholesale murderer went unmolested to his grave. Sulla really had in him more of principle than Cæsar; but Cæsar was a man, Sulla was like a destroying angel. Cæsar one might have loved, at Sulla one could only shudder; perhaps one might have shuddered most of all at the careless and mirthful hours of the author of the proscription. Great he was in every natural gift; great, one might almost say, in his vices; great in his craft of soldier and ruler, great in his unbending will, great in the crimes which human wickedness never can outdo. In his strange superstition, the most ruthless of men deemed himself the special favourite of the softest of the idols with which his heaven was peopled. We too can acknowledge the heaven-sent luck of Sulla, but in another sense. If Providence ever sends human instruments to chastise a guilty world, we may see in the all-accomplished Roman aristocrat, no less than in the Scythian savage, one who was, beyond all his fellow-men, emphatically the Scourge of God.

* [To Roman enemies certainly; but Vercingetorix must not be forgotten. No captives were slain at the triumph of Pompeius.]

IX.

THE FLAVIAN CESARS.

A History of the Romans under the Empire. By CHARLES MERIVALE, B. D. * Vols. VI. and VII. London, 1858-62.

WE are sorry that Mr. Merivale has made up his mind to bring his work to an end at a point earlier than that which he first fixed upon. His first purpose was to carry on his history to the time of Constantine; he has now ended it with the death of Marcus Aurelius. Each of these points makes a good ending for the book, because each marks the end of a distinct period in the annals of the Empire. We should have better liked the later date, partly because it marks the completion of a still more marked change than the other, partly because it would have given us the advantage of Mr. Merivale's companionship over a longer space. By leaving off where he has left off, Mr. Merivale indeed avoids any show of rivalry with Gibbon. He now leaves off where Gibbon begins, and the two may be read as a consecutive history. But we do not think that Mr. Merivale, or any scholar of Mr. Merivale's powers, need be frightened off any portion of the wide field between Commodus and the last Constantine, simply through dread of seeming rivalry with Gibbon. That Gibbon should ever be displaced seems impossible. That wonderful man monopolized, so to speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole generation, and left little indeed of either for any of his contemporaries. He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set

* [Now D.D. and Dean of Ely.]

aside. We may correct and improve in detail from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time; we may write again large parts of his story from other, and often truer and more wholesome, points of view. But the work of Gibbon, as a whole, as the encyclopædic history of thirteen hundred years, as the grandest of historical designs carried out alike with wonderful power and with wonderful accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too. But, for that very reason, the scholar who reproduces any particular part of Gibbon's History, Dean Milman or Mr. Finlay,—we wish we could add Mr. Merivale, -does not really enter into any rivalry with his great predecessor. The two things are different in kind, and each may be equally good in its own way. We do not think of comparing the man who deals with the whole of a vast subject with the man who deals-necessarily at far greater detail— with one particular part of it. And, after all, we hardly feel that we have reached Gibbon's proper and distinctive field, till we have reached a later period than that which he and Mr. Merivale would have had in common. Gibbon is before all things the historian of the trànsition from the Roman world to the world of modern Europe. But that transition can hardly be said to have openly begun till we reach the point which Mr. Merivale at first set before him as the goal of his labours.

Still, as it is, Mr. Merivale has the advantage of occupying, absolutely without a rival in his own tongue, the period of history which he has chosen for himself. It is only in his opening volumes that he comes into competition with Arnold, and there only with Arnold before he had reached the fulness of his powers. The history of the Emperors he has, among writers of his own class, wholly to himself. Yet it must not be thought that he owes his vantage-ground solely to the lack of competition. His history is a great work in itself, and it must be a very great work indeed which can outdo it within its own range. In days of licensed blundering like ours, it is delightful indeed to come across the sound and

finished scholarship, the unwearied and unfailing accuracy, of Mr. Merivale. It is something to find, for once, a modern writer whom one can trust, and the margin of whose book one has not to crowd with corrections of his mistakes. On some points we hold that Mr. Merivale's views are open to dispute; but it is always his views, never his statements. With Mr. Merivale we may often have to controvert opinions which are fair matters of controversy; we never have to correct blunders or to point out misrepresentations. We have somewhat of a battle to fight with him, so far as he is in some sort an advocate of Imperialism; but it is all fair fighting with a fair and moderate advocate. Compared with Arnold's noble third volume, Mr. Merivale's narrative seems heavy, and his style is cumbered with needless Latinisms, savouring, sometimes of English newspapers, sometimes of French historians and politicians. Still he always writes with weight and clearness, often with real vigour and eloquence. That he is lacking in the moral grandeur of Arnold, his burning zeal for right, his unquenchable hatred of wrong, is almost implied in the choice of his subject and the aspect in which he views it. But the gift of rising to the dignity of a prophet without falling into the formal tediousness of a preacher is something which Arnold had almost wholly to himself. And even that gift had its disadvantages. Arnold could have written the history of the Empire only in the spirit of a partizan. Arnold was never unfair, but the very keenness of his moral sense sometimes made him unjust. He was apt to judge men by too high a standard. Mr. Merivale's calmer temper has some advantages. If he does not smite down sin like Arnold, he lets us see more clearly the extenuating circumstances and temptations of the sinner. He has, as we think, somewhat of a love of paradox, but it is kept fairly in check by a really sound and critical judgement. While we cannot help setting down Mr. Merivale as, in some degree, an apologist of Imperial tyranny, we are never sorry to see any cause in the hands of an apologist so competent and so candid. Indeed, when we compare his history with the fanatical advocacy of

Mr. Congreve, we hardly feel that we have any right to call him an apologist at all. *

We said that both the point at which Mr. Merivale first intended to stop, and that at which he has actually laid down his pen, each marked the close of a distinct period in the Imperial history. The history of the Roman Empire is the history of two tendencies, working side by side, and greatly influencing one another. The one is the gradual change from the commonwealth to the avowed monarchy; the other is the gradual extension of the name and character of Romans over the inhabitants of the whole empire. Of the former the beginnings may be seen for some time before the usurpation of either Cæsar; of the latter we may trace the beginnings up to the very foundation of the Roman city. The age of Constantine, the point first chosen by Mr. Merivale, marks the final and complete triumph of both these tendencies; it is also marked by the first appearance, as really visible and dominant influences, of the two great elements of modern life-the Christian and the Teutonic element. The mere beginnings of both of course come far earlier, but it was in the third century that they began directly and visibly to influence the course of Roman affairs. When the Christian Emperor reigns at Constantinople, when all purely pagan and all local Roman ideas have become the merest shadows, when Cæsar presides in the Councils of the Church and has to defend his Empire against Goths and Vandals, we feel that the purely classical period is over, that the middle ages have in truth begun. The last Constantine hardly differs so much from the first as the first does from the first Augustus. Here then is the most important stopping-point of all. But the tendencies which reached their height under Constantine had been working all along. It was Diocletian rather than Constantine who really forsook the Old Rome; what Con

* [Mr. Congreve's Lectures on the Roman Empire of the West are perhaps best remembered through the crushing review by Mr. Goldwin Smith in the Oxford Essays.]