age, men dare not withdraw the veil of the dead language to which its hideous secrets were committed by the biographers of emperors, an abject baseness of servility in the vulgar of every rank which can be measured only by the facilities of torture and murder belonging to the human monster whom they adored as a god and dreaded as a fiend, a wide-spread corruption of everything that distinguishes man from the lowest of the brutes, and a fierce exaggeration of every instinct that he shares with them.
If the foundation of the Empire by Cæsar is to be interpreted as a providential arrangement designed to favour the early progress of Christianity, it will be necessary to complete Mr Froude's picture of it, as a reign of law, by arguing that its moral corruption enervated qualities which might otherwise have rallied to the defence of paganism. We have no desire to enter now upon so extensive a field of controversy; but there is one aspect of the matter which the literature of Cæsar's age, and that of the age which immediately succeeded it, brings vividly before every reader. The purest and loftiest characters of the early Empire had this in common with the vilest: they were never very far from the conclusion that life had ceased to be worth living, and that it was better to die than to live. A Roman letter-writer of the first century tells how he was once sailing on Lake Como when a friend pointed out a villa on the shore with a balcony projecting over the water, and described what had lately occurred there. The master of the villa had long
