all his victories, to have subdued his just resentment against the adversaries who had driven him, The Third Founder of Rome, a wanderer over African wastes, [the merciless men who had imbued their hands in the blood of his relatives and friends, to have stifled the remembrance of such injuries, and abstained from reprisals against their murderers. But, such forgiveness of recent wrongs, besides that it did not accord with the ideas, and even the religious tenets of antiquity, which had even deified revenge, would perhaps not have been allowed by the relations of the victims, slain by command of Sylla, while he ruled in Rome, and at a moment when the authority of the new-made Consul was yet infirm and tottering. These acts of Marius's party, rather than his own deeds, have been visited on his memory with a ferocity of vituperation by all historians, which when we compare it to the indulgence they have shown to the enormities enacted by Sylla, in the exercise of solid, undisputed, regularly established anthority, lead to the conclusion, that all this indignation is directed not so much against the crimes they have charged Marius with, as against the popular cause of which he was the undaunted, and, to the last, the faithful champion!

It is but justice to Marius that we should say, that these bloody and indiscriminate executions of all the leaders of a party, that fell into the hands of the conqueror; these proscriptions of all who had sought safety in flight; these confiscations of the estates of all who had sided with the vanquished, commenced with Sylla! Even modern writers, on public law, justify reprisals, as means to bring back the party guilty of enormities, to a more humane mode of warfare. Between contending regular armies, in our own days, in cases of violation of the acknowledged rules of war, reprisals, even to the taking away the life of persons not having participated in the lawless acts, are of no rare occurrence; and there seems to be no good reason assignable, why this same guarantee given to soldiers, should not be extended to peaceful citizens in a civil war, particularly, by the party defending the constitution and the laws against rebellion to the one and resistance to the others. There are periods too, in the life of a nation, when these dire inflictions appear to be a return to the natural law of self-defence! Thus, the execution of troops, who have yielded themselves in battle as prisoners of war, when these cannot be guarded, or freed, without endangering the very existence of the conquering army, has been paliated, if not justified, by writers of high repute. These are the dread consequences of war, in general, and still more of civil wars. Philosophers, mourn over these; but through ages of civilization, neither they nor statesmen, have yet succeeded in devising any way of avoiding those degrading appeals of nations to brutal force, rather than to the laws of eternal justice, except that which kings and aristocracies have ever sought to prevent-taking away power out of the hands of the

selfish few, and entrusting it to the keeping of the many! The history of all nations (except the young and glorious annals of our own beloved country) may be likened to the spunge used in surgical operations; it looks clean and unsoiled to the careless eye, but grasp it firmly, and blood and matter ooze out of it! If the disgust expressed by aristocratic historians, at these acts of cruelties, under whatever circumstances committed, by whatever specious plea of necessity justified or extenuated, were sincere, they would surely find the same inspirations of vituperative eloquence on all parallel occasions-not so, however; their tears of hypocritical sorrow fall only when noble blood has been made to flow-not a sigh, not a word of sympathy when thousands of low born victims, are trodden beneath the iron heels of the war horse, under the pretence to curb the madness of popular aspirations. Had royalty and aristocracy triumphed in France and decimated the whole guilty nation, (it was so termed) we should have lost the eloquent declamations of Burke; and the whole race of aristocratic declaimers and poets, would have remained, unpensioned, untitled, and as unknown to their contemporaries, as they will certainly be to posterity!

Marius, though he was prepared, in spite of his age, to meet Sylla, who, having terminated the war in the East, was hastening towards Rome by forced marches, was aware however that it was not an Octavius, a Merula, that he would have to contend with, but he who had but recently expelled him from Rome, and compelled Mithridates to accept at his hands a dishonourable peace-the insecurity of the present, the anxious previsions of the future, induced the malady which at the age of seventy closed his long career of honour and fame. So slight, indeed, was his indisposition at first, that, as related by Caius Piso, shortly before his death, in conversations with his friends who sat round his bed, he gave full history of his lifo, from his earliest youth; and after expatiating on the instability of fortune, exclaimed, "That it was beneath the dignity of a wise man to live in subjection to that fickle deity."

Thus, at the age of seventy, distinguished by the unparalleled honour of seven consulates, died Caius Marius, the most renowned, before Cæsar, of all the old Romans.

We close not our examination here: it were to leave our task incomplete, if after having strewed over Marius's tomb the guardian laurel and oaken wreaths, alike due to the patriot and the warrior, we did not proceed to show the contrast between his acts and those of Sylla, when the last, victorious, at Charonea and Orchomenes, triumphant over the unskillful leaders of the Marian party, without having encountered, except in one battle, an adversary worthy of contending with him, entered Rome, for the second time, the undisputed ruler of its destinies.

This noble prey, on which, like a vulture, he had now fastened, lacerating and tearing up its very vicera, was well nigh wrested from Sylla, just as he was on the point of seizing it with his iron talons. Telesinus, a Samnite chief, had taken the field in support of Cinna. On his march to relieve young Marius, besieged in Præneste, he learned that Sylla, and Pompey were both advancing against him in opposite directions, intending to hem him between their two armies. After examining at one glance, his position and that of each of his adversaries, he resolved, not merely to escape the snare in which Sylla and his presumptuous young lieutenant thought to have entangled him, but by a master movement to crush at once both his advesaries, and the allies, he had unwillingly served! to involve Rome itself and the Romans in one common and promiscuous ruin, avenging Italy and the world of the outrages of these relentless oppressors- -nor was the execution of that manœuvre, unworthy of the mind that had formed the plan! He raised his camp in the silence of a dark and stormy night, marching straight on to Rome, which he knew to be unguarded except by its population, no longer warlike as it was when Hannibal, paused before its walls, not that he proved unfaithful to his fortune, but that he saw it defended by an army of citizen soldiers. As the morning dawned, he drew his army in battle order, within ten furlongs of the Colline gate; thence, with a mind elated by the success of the bold manœuvre by which he had foiled two generals of such high reputation; and while his soldiers were resting after their long nocturnal march, he viewed Rome, as the prize of his daring!

The young nobility of the city, as soon as daylight showed them the Samnite army, mounted their horses and boldly charged the foe; but the onset of this undisciplined cavalry was repulsed with terrible slaughter: all was now tumult, dread, and wild confusion in Rome; and scenes of deep horror would soon have been acted within the very walls of the Eternal City, but that Sylla, like Telesinus a pupil of Marius, had also learnt from their illustrious master, the value of time in war! It would seem that the antagonist movements of great commanders have something of that fatal precision that marks the gyrations of celestial bodies, the motions of one necessarily determining those of the other. Thus in the present instance, Sylla early discovered that his adversary had broken through the nets with which he thought to have encircled him, and without the loss of an hour he followed his footsteps; sending Balbus, an active officer, at the head of a strong body of cavalry to harrass Telesinus on his march if he should overtake him, and with orders to attack him immediately if he found

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him in position before Rome, or in the act of storming it. These orders, Balbus executed with the greatest vigour; scarcely allowing his horses to breathe before he commenced the action, he charged the Samnite infantry with headlong impetuosity! Almost at the same moment Sylla himself appeared in sight, leading on his whole army to the onset! No battle during the civil war, was fought with such determined valour and obstinate tenacity. On the right, Crassus was victorious but the left had already began to give way, when Sylla, rushed into the thickest of the fight. He rode a white horse of wonderful swiftness and vigour; two Samnites, who knew him well, simultaneously hurled their spears at him. He was unaware of the danger; but a tribune, who rode near him, by a sudden blow, made the horse spring forward with a long leap, and the javelins stuck quivering in the ground, having only grazed the hind legs of the horse! It was then, that kissing a small golden image of the Delphic Apollo, which in all hts battles he wore in his bosom, he thus addressed the god with fervent devotion: "O Pythian Apollo, who hast thus conducted the fortunate Cornelius Sylla through so many wars with honour, when thou hast brought him to the threshold of Rome, wilt thou let him fall, thus ingloriously, by the hands of his own fellow citizens?"

Vain his prayer-vain, too, all the efforts of his valour and example—either to stop or rally the panic-struck troops! Then would have closed the career of Sylla, but that Crassus, following up his success, so thoroughly routed both the right wing of the enemy and the centre, where Telesinus commanded in person, that what remained of the Samnite army fled in confusion to Antenma, where the Romans, early on the next morning, began to besiege them. The garrison, despairing of relief, aud trusting to the honour of Sylla, who had promised to spare their lives, surrendered at discretion. These prisoners, to the number of six thousand, he had collected in the Circus ; and, having assembled the Senate in the Temple of Bellona, the moment he began his harangue, the troops, as he had ordered, fell sword in hand on these wretched men, and slaughtered them all! The horrible yells of so many victims, the wild uproar of so many voices imploring at once the plighted faith of Sylla and the mercy of their assassins, struck the senators with awe and horror; but Sylla, with unaltered looks, continuing his discourse with unfaltering voice, bade them "attend to what he was saying, and not trouble themselves about what was doing without; for that the noise they heard came only from some malefactors, whom he had ordered to be chastised !”

It was a peculiar trait of Sylla's motley character, that success which, not unfrequently, softens the sternest mind served but to

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stimulate his innate ferocity into madness. "Death," Plutarch says, was the punishment he decreed for any one that should harbour or save a person proscribed-even a father, a son, or a brother! Two talents were the reward of assassination, whether it were a slave that killed his master, or a son his father!"

The wretch, L. S. Catiline, who had slain his own brother, during the civil war : to be pardoned that crime, killed Marcus Marius; brought his head to Sylla, as he sat upon his tribunal in the Forum; and then, in irony of the gods, "washed his bloody hands in the lustral water at the door of Apollo's Temple, which was close by !" About the same time, was acted the darker scene of this tragic and calamitous period-Mutilus, one of the proscribed, coming privately and in disguise to the back-door of his wife's house-she refused to admit him, telling him that "he was a forbidden man!" Mutilus stabbed himself, and before he fell, sprinkled his wife's house with his blood!

After having spread the stupor of astonishment and dread both over the people and the Senate, Sylla assumed the Dictatorship, a magistracy which for a period of one hundred and twenty years had been discontinued; compelled the Senate to recognize the legality of all his acts, and to clothe him, by a decree, "with the power of life or death, of confiscating, colonizing, building or demolishing cities; of giving or taking away kingdoms at his pleasure!" On prostitutes, harpers, buffoons, and the vilest of his freedmen, he bestowed the revenues of cities and provinces, and even compelled women of Patrician families to marry some of these wretches! After having anticipated, so to speak, Tiberius in cruelty and lust,-forestalling even the wildest aberrations of a Nero or a Caligula: in a speech to the people, in which he recapitulated the instances of his good fortune, he laid no less stress on these, than on those of his conduct and valour; and, as though to insult the understanding of the Romans after having trampled on their freedom, he decreed that in future, he should be called, “Felix” the Fortunate! But in writing to the Grecians, Plutarch says, " he assumed the additional name of Epaphroditus," "the loved of Venus"-a bitter derision this, both of nature and of love, whose laws and dictates he had alike outraged by his acts, and thwarted in his hideous debaucheries! And yet such was the degradation of the Romans of that period-such too the sway of fame and glory over the female mind-that Valeria, a woman of great beauty and illustrious family, the daughter of Messala, the sister of the orator Hortensius, sitting near Sylla at the Circus, when he presented to the people a show of gladiators, came behind the Dictator, touched him, and plucking off a little of the nap of his purple robe, immediately re