to a reference to the record of the actions of his life, and such a reference will abundantly confirm every particular of the description. The steady and unanimous decision of the learned and the truly great of different ages, since his time, is enough to show his solid claims to the highest praise here given. Passing over the glory so uniformly yielded to him by the learned and eloquent of ancient days, we have among moderns the disinterested opinions of such men as the immortal Lord Verulam, from whom came the sentence given above, pronouncing him "the most perfect character of all antiquity;" a sentiment which, probably, no man of minute historical knowledge ever read, without a hearty acquiescence. This opinion has been quoted with approbation by our own greatest statesman, Alexander Hamilton, than whom none knew better how to appreciate real greatness. Lord Byron (Note 47 on Canto IV. of Childe Harold,) also quotes this sentence approvingly, and in the same passage gives a most interesting view of Caesar's versatile genius and varied accomplishments, entering more fully into some particulars than that here given. The sentence of the Roman historian, Suetonius, (Jure caesus existimetur,) seems to me to refer, not to the moral fitness or actual right of his murder, but to the common law or ancient usage of Rome, by which any person of great influence, who was considered powerful enough to be dangerous to the ascendency of the patrician rank, or to the established order of things in any way, might be killed by any self-constituted executioner, even though the person thus murdered on bare suspicion of a liability to become dangerous, should really be innocent of the charge of aspiring to supreme power. ("Melium jure caesum pronuntiavit, etiam si regni crimine insons fuerit." Liv. lib. iv. cap. 48.) The idea, that such an abominable outrage on the claim of an innocent man to his own life, could ever be seriously defended as morally right, is too palpably preposterous to bear a consideration. Such a principle of policy must have originated in a republicanism, somewhat similar to that which sanctions those exertions of democratic power, which have lately become famous under the name of Lynch law. It was a principle which in Rome enabled the patrician order to secure the destruction of any popular man of genius and intelligence, who, being able, might become willing to effect a revolution which would humble the power of the patrician aristocracy. The murder of the Gracchi, also, may be taken as a fair manifestation of the way in which the aristocracy were disposed to check the spirit of reform.
The work of Caesar, then, was twofold, like the tyranny which he was to subvert; and well did he achieve both objects of his mighty efforts. Having first brought down the pride and the power of an overbearing aristocracy, he next, by the force of the same dominant genius, wrested the ill-wielded dominion from the unsteady hands of the fickle democracy, making them willingly subservient to the great purpose of their own subjugation, and acquiescent in the generous sway of one, whom a sort of political instinct taught them to fix on, as the man destined to rule them.
Thus were the complicated and contradictory principles of Roman government exchanged for the simplicity of monarchical rule; an exchange most desirable for the peace and security of the subjects of the government. The empire was no longer shaken with the constant vacillations of supremacy from the aristocracy to the democracy, and from the democracy to the demagogues, alternately their tyrants and their slaves. The solitary tyranny of an emperor was occasionally found terrible in some of its details, but the worst of these could never outgo the republican cruelties of Marius and Sylla, and there was, at least, this one advantage on the side of those suffering under the monarchical tyranny, which would not be available in the case of the victims of mob-despotism. This was the ease with which a single stroke with a well-aimed dagger could remove the evil at once, and secure some chance of a change for the better, as was the case with Caligula, Nero, and Domitian; and though the advantages of the change were much more manifest in the two latter cases than in the former, yet, even in that, the relief experienced was worth the effort. But a whole tyrannical populace could not be so easily and summarily disposed of; and those who suffered by such despotism, could only wait till the horrible butcheries of civil strife, or the wasting carnage of foreign warfare, had used up the energies and the superfluous blood of the populace, and swept the flower of the democracy, by legions, to a wide and quiet grave. The remedy of the evil was therefore much slower, and more undesirable in its operation, in this case, than in the other; while the evil itself was actually more widely injurious. For, on the one hand, what imperial tyrant ever sacrificed so many victims in Rome, or produced such wide-wasting ruin, as either of those republican chiefs, Marius and Sylla? And on the other hand, when, in the most glorious and peaceful days of the aristocratic or democratic sway,
