as partial accomplices in this plot, and who consider also what parties were the exposers or merciless avengers of this plot, was but a reiteration of the attempts made within the previous fifty years by Marius, Cinna, Sylla, and finally by Cæsar and by his heir Octavius, to raise a reformed government, safe and stable, upon this hideous oligarchy that annually almost brought the people of Rome into the necessity of a war and the danger of a merciless proscription. That the usual system of fraudulent falsehoods was offered by way of evidence against Catiline, is pretty obvious. Indeed, why should it have been spared? The evidence, in a lawyer's sense, is after all none at all. The pretended revelations of foreign envoys go for nothing. These could have been suborned most easily. And the shocking defect of the case is that the accused party were never put on their defence, never confronted with the base tools of the accusers, and the senators amongst them were overwhelmed with clamors if they attempted their defence in the senate. The motive to this dreadful injustice is manifest. There was a conspiracy; that we do not doubt; and of the same nature as Cæsar's. Else why should eminent men, too dangerous for Cicero to touch, have been implicated in the obscurer charges? How had they any interest in the ruin of Rome? How had Catiline any interest in such a tragedy? But all the grandees, who were too much embarrassed in debt to bear the means of profiting by the machinery of bribes applied to so vast a populace, naturally wished to place the administration of public affairs on another footing; many from merely selfish purposes, like Cethegus or

Lentulus some, we doubt not, from purer motives of enlarged patriotism. One charge against Catiline we may quote from many, as having tainted the most plausible part of the pretended evidence with damnatory suspicions. The reader may not have remarked but the fact is such that one of the standing artifices for injuring a man with the populace of Rome, when all other arts had failed, was to say, that amongst his plots was one for burning the city. This cured that indifference with which otherwise the mob listened to stories of conspiracy against a system which they held in no reverence or affection. Now, this most senseless charge was renewed against Catiline. It is hardly worthy of notice. Of what value to him could be a heap of ruins? Or how could he hope to found an influence amongst those who were yet reeking from such a calamity?

But, in reality, this conspiracy was that effort continually moving underground, and which would have continually exploded in shocks dreadful to the quiet of the nation, which mere necessity, and the instincts of position, prompted to the parties interested. Let the reader only remember the long and really ludicrous succession of men sent out against Antony at Mutina by the senate, viz. Octavius, Plancus, Asinius Pollio, Lepidus, every one of whom fell away almost instantly to the anti-senatorial cause, to say nothing of the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, who would undoubtedly have followed the general precedent, had they not been killed prematurely and it will become apparent how irresistible this popular cause was, as the sole introduction to a patriotic reformation, ranged too notoriously

against a narrow scheme of selfishness, which interested hardly forty families. It does not follow that all men, simply as enemies of an oligarchy, would have afterwards exhibited a pure patriotism. Cæsar, however, did. His reforms, even before his Pompeian struggle, were the greatest ever made by an individual; and those which he carried through after that struggle, and during that brief term which his murderers allowed him, transcended by much all that in any one century had been accomplished by the collective patriotism of Rome.

mero

STYLE.

AMONGST the never-ending arguments for thankfulness in the privilege of a British birth- arguments more solemn even than numerous, and telling more when weighed than when counted, pondere quàm nuthree aspects there are of our national character which trouble the uniformity of our feelings. A good son, even in such a case, is not at liberty to describe himself as 'ashamed.' Some gentler word must be found to express the character of his distress. And, whatever grounds of blame may appear against his venerated mother, it is one of his filial duties to suppose either that the blame applies but partially, or, if it should seem painfully universal, that it is one of those excesses to which energetic natures are liable, through the very strength of their constitutional characteristics. Such things do happen. It is certain, for instance, that to the deep sincerity of British nature, and to that shyness or principle of reserve which is inseparable from self-respect, must be traced philosophically the churlishness and unsocial bearing, for which, at one time, we were so angrily arraigned by the smooth south of Europe. That facile obsequious