dent foresight superior to the chiefs; in personal intrepidity, in patient endurance of toil, in rigid abstemiousness, he contended with the hardiest of the legionaries. By such acts, by a conduct so accordant with the feelings of the soldiers, who love best those officers who share their privations and labours in the camp as well as their perils in the field, his fame and influence spread from Africa to Rome; and, long before he had declared himself a candidate for the Consulate, the people and the army proclaimed that he alone could bring that tedious war to a glorious issue. It is not our intention to depict Marius, young and ambitious as he was during his Numidian campaigns, as one of temper likely to bear without repining the superiority of a chief not his equal in abilities. There may have been faults on both sides leading to the open rupture between the veteran Consul and his young lieutenant; but surely Metellus does not justify the character of mild urbanity given him by Sallust, when, taunting Marius, then an avowed candidate for the Consulship, he advised him to postpone his claim until his son (pointing to a child of ten years) was of age to run for that magistracy with him. Nor did he show himself a generous adversary, in refusing him leave to return to Rome, until there wanted only twelve days to the election. The long distance from the camp to Utica, the indefatigable soldier travelled in sixty hours. On arriving in sight of the sea, Marius sacrificed to the gods. The priest, on casting his eyes on the entrails of the victim, suddenly exclaimed, "Hasten, Marius, hasten to Rome! the gods promise even more than thou darest to hope!" Cheered by these assurances of divine favour, he spread his sails to propitious winds, and accomplished the voyage from Utica to Rome in less than four days. He was presented to the people by one of the tribunes, and confident both in his own genius, and in the fortune of the republic, promised, after having been almost unanimously elected consul, either to slay Jugurtha, or to bring him to Rome a captive..

The citizens flocked to enlist under so renowned a leader; but faithful to the popular principles of which he was himself the glorious manifestation, he received as soldiers in the legions, in spite of the murmurs of the aristocracy, all who wished to serve their country, without paying any regard to the property qualifications required by patrician consuls-believing the privilege of defending one's country to be a natural right, he disregarded as usurpations all laws taking away from Roman citizens that inalienable birthright of man, both savage and civilized. This bold innovation by which Marius wrested, as it were, the sword of Rome from the hands of the nobility and of the middle classes, to put it in the keeping of sturdy proletaries, increased, even to madness, the hatred the aristocracy bore to Marius ever since the

vigour of his tribunitial administration had humbled their pride of caste, in the persons of their representatives, Metellus and Cotta. It was their insulting allusion to the obscurity of his birth—and not, as Sallust and Plutarch assert, the vanity of a sudden high fortune-that drew on his adversaries this bitter sarcasm from Marius, "that he took away from the patricians the Consulate, as a burthen too heavy to be sustained by men enervated by idleness and sloth." Nor, when he was publicly reproached for his ignorance of Greek letters and eloquence, and tauntingly asked to bring forth the statues of his illustrious ancestors, was it a vain pride that made him exclaim, with an eloquence of the heart, more striking than that taught in Rome by the sophists of degenerate Greece, "that he offered to the eyes of the people only his breast lacerated with glorious wounds, instead of pointing to the images of others, or to the monuments of the dead!"

Marius, it is true, had not visited Athens, in order to learn there what the Greeks then pretended to teach, eloquence !-as if that divine faculty, or its sister art, poetry, could be taught in rules and precepts, by men, who, though they might perplex the judgment, could never enlighten the mind, elevate the fancy, or warm the heart! And yet, inexpert as he confessedly was in their school gymnastics, what more powerful burst of compassioned eloquence can be found in the records of Athenian Oratory, than this withering part of his speech to the people, when, pointing to Albinus and Bestia, patrician generals vanquished, or bribed in Africa, by Jugurtha, he indignantly exclaimed, “The ancestors of those men, who themselves rose to fame, not by their high birth, but by their virtue and their heroic achievements, rather than in such degenerate progeny, would have gloried in a posterity of warriors like me!"

These defyings of their enemies, these unanswerable vindications of his deservings of popular favour, pleased the multitude ever prone to measure the greatness of a man by the fearlessness of his language to those they have been accustomed to dread.

The promises made to the Roman people, Marius kept with the punctuality of a ready debtor, fulfilling on the very day agreed upon, the contract he entered into, with them, when they made him consul.

The Jugurthan war has had its historian. The work of Sallust has escaped the fatality that has deprived us of the commentaries of Sylla; of the history that Catulus had written of the Cimbric war, in which he bore a consular command; of that of the Marsic, or social war, composed by Lucullus-the one the rival, the deadly foe of Marius; the other two, the maligners of a renown they had vainly sought either to equal or to tarnish; and all three of the Patrician order, having, therefore, a deep interest to weaken, by calumniating it, the glory of a name held

in such veneration by the Roman proletaries, even in the lifetime of Sylla, that Cæsar, by producing at the funeral of Julia, his aunt, the images of Marius Victorious over the Cimbri, laid the foundation of the high popularity he ever possessed in Rome. That history remains, at the same time, a proud monument of genius, and the evidence of the prejudices that warped the mind of the author against one who had no claim to Patrician origin. Yet, in his very pages, studiously elaborate to cast a shade over the glorious plebeian, his high deeds shine with a lustre that refuses to be clouded; and to Sallust, the impartial reader is often tempted to address the indignant words with which a greater writer brands the like indignity offered to a departed patriot, "Negatus honor gloriam intendit."

It is not the design of this paper to give even a brief sketch of that memorable contest, waged in a country, and against an adversary, equally calling forth the higher qualities of a commander-the one, by its configuration, unfavourable to the agressive operations of an invader; the other, by his own talents, and the advantage he skilfully drew from the organization of his troops, one admirably adapted to the peculiarity of local circumstances, and the genius of African soldiery-Important as was, in fact, this last struggle for African independence against Italian dominion, by its varied fortune, the genius of the renowned chiefs who made trial of their skill and valour on grounds, where Hannibal and Scipio nearly a century before contended for fame and dominion, an additional interest is attached to it by the fatality which, during that war, gave to Marius, in one of his lieutenants, Lucius Cornelius Sylla, not a rival for fame, valour, and talents, such as Marius had approved himself to Metellus, but an instrument of the aristocracy, one jealous of his honours and intent on filching from his general the glory of his victories by those acts, those low intrigues, so familiar-we had almost said, so congenial-to the nobly

born.

It is not true that Sylla incurred the hatred of his chief, by the part he acted in relation to the delivery of Jugurtha by Bocchus, a captive of the Roman people, since he continued to employ him as his Quaestor during the first year of the Cimbric war. But, though unwilling to deprive the republic of the services of so able an officer, it was but

natural that he should watch narrowly one whom the patricians affected to represent as his equal in arms, and his superior in all the endowments required for administering the affairs of the republic. Nor ought impartial historians to have omitted to give Marius his deserved praise for having thus sacrificed his private resentment to the public good.

Defeated in every battle where he dared to meet, on open ground,

the weight and invincible array of the legions; worsted even in the encounters and ambuscades more congenial both to his own genius and the habits and peculiar discipline of his troops, Jugurtha was at last driven from his own dominions, and compelled to seek an asylum at the court of Bocchus, his father-in-law. The presence of Jugurtha threw the King of Mauritania into the greatest perplexity. He received him, not as an allied sovereign, the husband of his daughter, but as a suppliant seeking in his palace a protection that might endanger his own regal power; and, as if to invite Marius to claim from him a fugitive adversary, began, of his own accord, to intercede with the consul in the behalf of Jugurtha; declaring in his letters, "that he never would give him up, but, on the contrary, defend his guest to the last extremity." A plebeian by birth, and educated among the labouring classes, so alive to all the natural affections, Marius it is probable though he would have pursued Jugurtha, and carried the war into Mauritania, in order, pursuant to his promise, either to slay or lead the Numidian king a captive to the Roman people-would never have asked Bocchus to deliver his own son-in-law into the hands of his foes! Of this the perfidious Mauritanian seemed aware; for, at the same time that in his letters to Marius he expressed such noble resolutions, he sent for Sylla, who in the course of the war had sought his friendship, pledging his royal word for his safety. The barbarian had formed a true estimate of the character of Sylla, even while his vices remained yet unrevealed to mankind. But why describ minutely what passed between two men of kindred feelings? The hesitations of Bocchus, sometime swayed by his desire to lay violent hands on Sylla, in disregard of his plighted faith, and again yielding to the promptings of self-interest that urged him to propitiate the wrath of the Romans by the sacrifice of a royal victim, were the only difficulties in that negociation, in which Bocchus seemed to grant to the terror of the Roman arms, that which he really paid as the price of the protection of Sylla, whose actual power he felt, and whose future greatness he foresaw, with that instinct of fear which is more unerring than the previsions of wisdom. To conclude this tale of kingly and patrician baseness; family ties, held sacred even among the meanest of mankind, were rudely torn asunder; the rites of hospitality held so holy in ancient days, remorsely violated; the religion of the hearth impiously profaned !-the father delivered alive and fettered, like a fugitive slave, the husband of his daughter to his deadliest foes the monarch surrendered a brother king to the general of a republic, the host gave up the guest who had embraced the altars of his household gods-the warrior betrayed his fellow-soldier to their common enemy! And Sylla, rioting amidst these accumulated atrocities, sat

feasting with gluttinous appetite at this banquet of iniquity, his mind seeming to dilate, expand and luxuriate in scenes of such rare atrocities!

Sylla needed no incitements from the enemies of Marius to claim, exclusively as his own, an act which no man possessed of generous feeling could have accomplished. He was so devoid of all true self respect that, instead of endeavoring to throw a decent veil over the part he had acted on this memorable occasion, he habitually sealed his letters with a ring on which a Grecian artist, had engraved, with exquisite art, Bocchus delivering to him Jugurtha, chained like a slave, as if his participation in a deed of such unprecedented baseness and perfidy, were a trophy of valour, or an evidence of wisdom. "Hence," exclaims Plutarch, "the seed of that implacable quarrel which almost ruined the Roman empire!" As if Marius, who had vanquished Jugurtha in the full pride of his power, could have envied the infamy of leading to the Roman camp, a prisoner betrayed by his ally, the father of his wife!

Marius, while he felt no jealousy of the growing reputation of Sylla, was aware, that though he was an instrument with which the aristocracy might for a while work the purposes of their ambition, yet, inflexibly resolved to obtain for himself the highest rank in the Republic, Sylla, if he succeeded in his designs, would bend both the nobility and the people under the same despotic yoke. This he was determined to prevent; not by low intrigues, but by deeds of eternal renown, that would, under all calamities and emergencies, caused either by domestic or foreign enemies, present him, to the Romans, as the prop and stay of the Republic.

In spite of his vauntings Sylla did not dare-(his fame and influence did not yet allow him to attempt it)-refuse to deliver the prisoner to the Consul, in order that he might grace his triumphant return to Rome.

The glad tidings of the victory obtained by Marius had scarcely reached the Senate, when rumors spread through the city, of the invasion of the Teutones and Cimbri, threw the Republic into the greatest alarm. The perils that threatened Italy, from the west, soon dispersed" (we cite Plutarch)-" all the envy, the hatred, and the calumnies which had been raised against Marius"- "The people now in want of an experienced commander, and searching for an able pilot to sit at the helm, that the Commonwealth might bear up against so dreadful ul a storm, found that no one of an opulent or noble family would stand for the consulate."

It was contrary to a fundamental law for any one to be chosen who was absent, but the people overruling all objections, called Marius to the command, and elected him, in his absence, a second time consul.