moderating and controlling force in the State, by an agrarian reform which should revive the rural middle class, now sunk in the gulf between the oligarchy and the rabble. If he had pursued these objects with the whole energy of his unrivalled gift for discovering means to any end which he desired, and if he had failed, then, indeed, the military monarchy would stand justified at the bar of history as the least of the evils which an inexorable necessity offered. But his armed self-reliance despaired of the Republic. The only cure which he could find for the distempers of Rome was similar to that which an observer at a safe distance once recommended for the griefs of Ireland; he plunged the forms of the Constitution beneath the flood, and when they rose again to the surface they were no longer tenanted by any living soul that could thwart him with resistance or complaint. The fact that a thing has happened is always a temptation for an ingenious mind to demonstrate that nothing else could have happened. If William III. had given us a military despotism instead of a Whig aristocracy, it would long ago have been proved that the stars in their courses were fighting against everything except that precise result. Cæsar, as we read his history, was a man of intense personal ambition, who attained his goal; having this peculiar good fortune, that when, by extraordinary gifts of character and intellect, he had reached a certain point, the circumstances of the time threw a veil over the final transformation scene of his career. A usurper, in passing from the position
