and Asia, will at once give a vivid impression of the extent and frequency of these works. Shaw's travels in northern Africa, give accounts of aqueducts, cisterns, fountains, and reservoirs, along through all the ancient Roman dominions in that region. The Modern Traveler (by Conder) will give abundant accounts of the remains of these works, in this and various other countries alluded to in the text; and some of them, still so perfect, as to serve the common uses of the inhabitants to this day.
All these mighty influences, working for the peace and comfort
of mankind, and so favorable to the spread of religious knowledge,
had been further secured by the triumphant and firm establishment
of the throne of the Caesars. Under the fitful sway of
the capricious democracy of Rome, conquest had indeed steadily
stretched east, west, north and south, alike over barbarian and
Greek, through the wilderness and the city. A long line of illustrious
consuls, such as Marcellus, the Scipios, Aemilius, Marius,
Sylla, Lucullus and Pompey, had, during the last two centuries
of the republic, added triumph to triumph, in bright succession,
thronging the streets of the seven-hilled city with captive kings,
and more than quadrupling her dominion. But while the corruption
of conquest was fast preparing the dissipated people to
make a willing exchange of their political privileges, for "bread
and amusements;" the enlightened portion of the citizens were
getting tired of the distracting and often bloody changes of popular
favoritism, and were ready to receive as a welcome deliverer,
any man who could give them a calm and rational despotism, in
place of the remorseless and ferocious tyranny of a brutal mob.
In this turn of the world's destiny, there arose one, in all points
equal to the task of sealing both justice and peace to the vanquished
nations, by wringing from the hands of a haughty people,
the same political power which they had caused so many to give
up to their unsparing gripe. He was one who, while, to common
eyes, he seemed devoting the flower of his youth and the strength
of his manhood to idleness and debauchery, was learning such
wisdom as could never have been learned in the lessons of the
sage,—wisdom in the characters, the capabilities, the corruption
and venality of his plebeian sovrans. And yet he was not one
who scorned the lessons of the learned, nor turned away from the
records of others' knowledge. In the schools of Rhodes, he sat
a patient student of the art and science of the orator, and
searched deeply into the stored treasures of Grecian philosophy.
Resplendent in arms as in arts, he devoted to swift and deserved
destruction the pirates of the Aegean, while yet only a raw student;
and with the same energy and rapidity, in Rome, attained
