The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-05 00:00:00

APRIL 5, 1856. past and the perils of the future, and Ey refused to recede one inch from their )n. As might be expected, this party red in its ranks better men of action the aristocrats ; their aims were practi definite. Tho others would be desig as waverers and visionaries ; and the [ uence is that the names of the former ieparably connected with the last strug ' the republic against tyranny. They become proverbs of virtue and patriotism, pronounced with admiration by thou who know not that the same cause pro both the proscriptions of Sulla and the of Cato. But there was also a third party, the foresight and political knowledge aristocrats united the more active and , tic qualities of the oligarchs. They imposed of younger men, who had been and bred in license and contempt of who had talents to discern the rotten if the present state of things, ambition lire to turn it to their own account, and in proportion to their ambition. At the this class, and immeasurably superior rest of them, was Julius Caesar. re was yet another statesman in whom is of a later period sac many heroic .s, and who doubtless possessed many of Aues which might have enabled him to the republic ; but on his banners non patria could never be inscribed. Pom rhaps not less than his rival, discerned .ness of the State; and had he possessed !nt patriotism or strength of character ly round him the whole Conservative .nd reconcile their differences, the days republic might have been lengthened, still numbered. But we agree with :erivale that Pompey, not less than , was aiming at supreme power. He en lured to use as tools both the aristocrats 'le oligarchs: both suspected him, and Ted him but a faint allegiance, and his forces could make no head against the counsels and prompt action of the ;Icsareans. . these remarks we may, we think, come conclusion that the autocracy of Angus _ not absolutely inevitable, could not been long dela) ed. The fresh civil wars followed the death of Julius had still disgusted the nation with public affairs. us dark death or dreamful ease " was teir prayer. Officials and public men Aopelessly corrupt. In vain had Cicero oed to the knights the privilege of sitting iudices, trusting thereby to curb the licen tess of the oligarchs. From among the is came the publicans, or farmers of the le ; from among the nobles the provin )rattors. These played into each other's The praitor connived at the extortion publican, and the publican, as a judex, .ted the prietor and his friends. To .e the forms of the republic amid this ,f organised corruption was manifestly Faith and honour were no more—the had lost its savour—the nation was ripe -ery. Merivale's style is temperate, and the ;sion of his opinions cautious. But it is fficult to see that he, too, is to some a victim of the fascination which is tsed over a certain class of minds to unity, vigour, and completeness !spotic governments. He is unjust, ink, to the Roman nobility, and we surmise is an enemy to the theory of graduation. In his account of the Ger to which we shall presently advert, there :riking passage bearing upon this sub n the meanti►ne let us turn to a more Lial subject—the Augustan literature. ►aracter and mission of Horace is finely ted the policy of Augustus to curtail the excessive of the few, and make the masses dependent for joyments upon the Government itself. It was im good service therefore to expose to scorn or the men who made a parade of their wealth, or anxiety to amass it; to sing the praise of simpli _ indifference, and contrast with the smoke, the and the splendour of Rome, the languid indolence of - slumbers in the meadow. At the same time, the , of the new nobility might demand some consols. from their patrons for the mortification they expe zed at the sneers of the survivors of the true aristocracy. them Horace had a salve in his specious disparagement lustrious parentage, and clas.:ent from generations of APRIL of the pat s t ur dily 11 position. n umbered t h a n the cal and de na ted as consequen are insepa: fi les of th have becol and are pr sands who (Weed botl suicide of who to th of the arit energetic were comp born and order, who ness of ti to desire t vigour in head of th to the rest There w Romans c qualities, a the virtue tve the sibi sed pat pey, perhe the sicknet sufficient I to rally r party and of the rei though sti Mr. Mull Caesar, deavoured and the c tendered : divided foi united co Caesareans From th to the cow tus, if no have been which folk further di:: " Give us now their were hop( restored t( as judices, tiousness knights ea revenue ; cial prneto hands. T of the put acquitted preserve t: mass of o useless. I salt had lo for slavery Mr. Me expression not diffict extent a exercised by the 1 of despot we think, should sus social gra( mans, to %I is a striki ject. In congenial The (than( sketched :• It was thi affluence of I their enjoyn doing him g ridicule the betrayed an: city and in, noise and the mid day slut jealousy of I tion from t nenced at thi For them H( of Illustrious THE PRESS. official notabilities. But whether he rebukes the vain, or ministers comfort to wounded susceptibility, he knows the art of sweetening his potions by his tone of good-humoured levity and ban'.er. Angry passions, he suggests, have been excited more than enough; it is time to allay irritation, to relieve men of their fears, to surround the throne with cheerful countenances ; to let all men know each other's weaknesses, and rely upon mutual indulgence. The genial magician who shall thus transform society must have special qualifications for a task so delicate. He must be of no family illustration himself, to make the new men jea lona ; he must be a man of courtly manners, to satisfy the taste of the refined ; he must dress with faultless neatness rather than elegance, trim his hair and beard caretully but not fantastically, have a tender indulgence for the vices of good company, and if his own stomach is too weak for an occasional excess, he must sit through the festive meetings of his companions, and enjoy at least their enjoyment. He must be fund of music and poetry ; and if he is able to entertain others with his wit, if, above all, he can strike the lyre to notes of genial harmony himself, he will become the soul of fellowship, the emperor's viceroy in the realms of fashion. He must be able to invest ordinary ideas with elegant language, and appeal to educated mediocrity by sentiments level with its understanding ; and then, if he can sometimes take a higher flight, and utter bursts of inspiration, solemn, passionate, and tender, if he can assume an enthusiasm worthy of a Roman freeman or a Grecian bard, and emulate the fire of Pinder with the steady glow of a sustained dignity, he will combine the voices of the generous and the vulgar, of the future and of the present, and become a fixed star in the heaven of poetry. A further task remains, however, for the favored instru ment of ministerial conservatism. Horace must teach the Roman gentlemen to be religious, or at least to appear so. Horace was himself, so he seems to confess, something of a scapegrace in his youth : one who could be so wrong and foolish as to embrace the cause of the murderers of divine Julius, must have imbibed some very false notions from the sources of his philosophy. He had dallied with the Greek ideologists, the corrupters of youth, in the schools of Athens ; he had fancied himself a disciple of Epicurus : child as he was, he had affected to renounce allegiance to all sound principles of religion as well as of politics. Under the change of his fortunes he has had the grace to repent; he has become devout; he wishes his countrymen to know how highly he now thinks of Jupiter and Apollo, no less than of Augustus and Maecenas. A man of ardent imagination and of delicate sensibility, a man who ques tioned the world and his own conscience both solemnly and sternly—such a man as Virgil, for instance—might well persuade himself that the miseries he had witnessed attested the mortal sin of renouncing the worship of the gods, and compassing the destruction of their hero ; but Horace has no such claim on our indulgent interpretation, and the palinodes of his lyric muse ring false to an atten• tive ear. Every despot likes to make a Capua for his people ; but every despot is not so fortunate in his instruments as Augustus. Like Niebuhr, Mr...Merivale does not, we think, do full justice to Propertius, though decidedly more favorable to him than the German critic. Neither Ovid nor Tibullus has written anything equal to the well known eleventh elegy of the fourth book; and there are several others, such as the fifth and twelfth of the third book, and eleventh of the first, which are not surpassed by any composi tion of his contemporaries. He is equal to Ovid in point and to Tibullus in tenderness. Tibullus is described by Mr. Merivale very fairly. He does not, however, mention what is so pleasant to the student of that poet — namely, those occasional chivalric sentiments which are found in Tibullus alone of all the ancient writers. We think he slightly over rates Ovid—" The ' Loves of the Heroines' is " the most elevated and refined in sentiment " of all elegiac compositions of the Romans." This, in our opinion, is about as true as if he should say that the epistle from Eloise to Abelard was the most elevated and refined in sentiment of all the elegiac compositions of the English. It is difficult to name any epistle of Ovid which is more free from gross images and gross suggestions than the famous elegy of Pope. In all that Mr. Merivale says on the character of Virgil we fully concur. Ile concludes his sketch of him with a quotation from a Vitgilian enthusiast, " that if Homer " really made Virgil, it was undoubtedly his " greatest work." Of the Germans Mr. Merivale writes : The liberty of the Germans was at best or ly the licence of a few chiefs and warriors, backed by a dark and perhaps a bloody superstition, in which the mass of the people, the bravest and least corrupted part of the nation, had no genuine share. Notwithstanding the false colours he has aimed at throwing over it, the picture of Teutonic freedom which Tacitus gives us is gloomy and revolting, with its solitary caves or wigwams in the forest, its sexes undistin guished in dress, its women, cared for indeed, but not for their charms or virtues, but as beasts of burden and imple ments of labour. That it was powerless to effect any pro gress, or to rise of itself to a higher sphere of civilisation, appears from the continued barbarism of the four suc ceeding centuries, during which it roamed its forests un- ..'1" '~ 47 .7 11 329 assailed by Rome, and constrained by no foreign pressure. The instincts of order and devotion, which distinguished the northern conquerors of Europe, lay undeveloped in the germ, till, in the course of Providence, they met the forms of law and of religion which they were destined so happily to impregnate. But it seems to us that the character which he draws of the Germans is one common to all barbarians. The instincts of order and devo tion were, at all events, just as strong in them as in all savages. But what we should judge by is the conduct of the race after it has " met " the forms of law and religion." Is it then superior to other races which have also met those forms? That is the question ; which, if answered in tl e affirmative, must certainly prove a greater previous fitness for their re ception. We scarcely understand the meaning of this superfluous attack upon our Teutonic ancestors. We only hope their English de scendants may continue to resist the gripe of centralisation as sturdily as they did. Mr. Merivale seems doubtful of the extreme depravity of the Royal Family of Rome, and inclined to depict them in milder colours. Neither Caligula, Claudius, nor Messalina were, he thinks, so bad as they have come down to us in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. One murder, however, or one adul tery, more or less, would not make much diffe rence in our estimate of their character. But we can recommend Mr. Merivale's description of these two last reigns as among the best things in the book. We close our notice with an extract from the death of Messalina. Nevertheless Messalina still hoped. She had withdrawn again to the gardens of Lucullus, and was there engaged in composing addresses of supplication to her husband, in which her pride and long-accustomed insolence still faintly struggled with her fears. Narcissus was not insensible to his danger, and was anxious to strike his last blow without delay. But the Emperor still paltered with the treason. He had retired to his palace ; he had bathed, anointed, and lain down to supper ; and warmed with wine and generous cheer, he had actually despatched a message to the poor creature, as he called her, bidding her come the next day and plead her cause before him. Narcissus knew how easy the passage might be from compassion to love; even the solitary night and the vacant couch would kindle, he feared, a sentiment of yearning and compunction in the fond do tard's mind. Swiftly gliding from the chamber, he boldly ordered a tribune and some centurions to go and slay his victim. Such, he said, was the Emperor's command ; and his word was obeyed without hesitation. Under the direc tion of a freedman Euodus, the armed men sought the outcast in her gardens, where she lay prostrate on the ground, by the side of her mother Lepida. While her for tunes flourished there had existed dissensions between them, but now, in her last distress, the mother had re fused to desert her child, and only strove to nerve her re solution to a voluntary death. Life, she urged, is over; nought remained to look for but a decent exit from it. But the soul of the reprobate was corrupted by her vices ; she retained no sense of honour ; she went on weeping and oroaning all in vain; when suddenly the doors were burst open, the tribune and his swordsmen appeared sternly before her, and Euodus assailed her, dumb-stricken as she lay, with contumelious and brutal reproaches. Roused at last to a sense of her hopeless condition, she took a weapon from one of the men's hands, and pressed it trembling against her throat and bosom. Still she wanted resolution to give the thrust, and it was by a blow of the tribune's falchion that the horrid deed was finally accomplished. The death of Asiaticus was avenged on the very spot ; the hot blood of the wanton smoked on the pavement of his gardens, and stained with a deeper hue the variegated marbles of Lucullus. The body was given up to her mother. Claudius had not yet risen from table when it was announced to him that Messalina was no more. Whether she had fallen by her own hand or by another's was not distinctly declared, nor did he inquire. Again he called for wine, pledged his guests, heard songs and music, and exhausted all the formalities of the banquet. Nor on the following day did he allude to the circumstance, or manifest any emotion of joy or hatred, of anger or of sorrow, neither on seeing the triumphant foes of Messa lina. nor her sorrowing children. The senate favoured the oblivion he seemed to court for the event, by decreeing that her name should be effaced from all public and private monuments. Narcissus was rewarded with the ornaments of the qurestorship. Kars and Erzeronm. With the Campaigns of Prince Paskiewitch in 1828 and 1829. By Lieutenant- General Monteith. London : Longmans. GENERAL MONTEITH'S work may be divided into three portions,—the first embracing the early wars between Russia and Persia, the second the struggle in the Caucasus, and the third the campaigns of Prince Paskiewitch in 1828-9. It is of a purely military character, and written throughout with military simpli city. The author was himself an eyewitness of many of the scenes which he describes, and they are always told with great perspicuity,