province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our Brutus did.—­Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,—­a kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,—­and truly, God knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!—­It is a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures, fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with some virtues:  Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser said, “they are hatched again, and hatched different.”

XVIII.  AUGUSTUS

We left Rome galloping down the Gadarene slope, and scrimmaging for a vantage point whence to hurl herself headlong.  Down she came; a riot and roaring ruin:  doing those things she ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things she ought to have done, and with no semblance of health in her.  There was nothing for it but the downfall of the world; good-bye civilization and all that was ever upbuilded of old.  Come now; we should become good Congo forester in our time, with what they call ‘long pig’ for our daintiest diet.  It is a euphemism for your brother man.

But supposing this mist-filled Gadarene gulf were really bridgable:  supposing there were another side beyond the roar of hungry waters and the horror; and that mankind,—­European mankind,—­might pass over, and be saved, were there but staying the rout for a moment, and affording a means to cross?

There is a bardic proverb in the Welsh:  A fo Ben, bydded Bont:—­’He who is Chief, let him be the bridge’:  Bran the Blessed said it, when he threw down his giant body over the gulf, so that the men of the Island of the Mighty might pass over into Ireland.  And the end of an old cycle, and the beginning of a new, when there is—­as in our Rome at that time—­a sort of psychic and cyclic impasse, a break-down and terrible chasm in history, if civilization is to pass over from the old conditions to the new, a man must be found who can be the bridge.  He must solve the problems within himself; he must care so little for, and have such control of, his personality, that he can lay it down, so to speak, and let humanity cross over upon it.  History may get no news of him at all; although he is then the Chief of Men, and the greatest living;—­or it may get news, only to belittle him.  His own and the after ages may think very little of him; he may possess no single quality to dazzle the imagination:—­he may seem cold and uninteresting, a crafty tyrant;—­or an uncouth old ex-rail-splitter to have in the White House;—­or an illiterate peasant-girl to lead your armies; yet because he is the bridge, he is the Chief; and you may suspect someone out of the Pantheons incarnate in him.