of France, with her Ministre des Beaux Arts in every cabinet.  Perhaps; these two, of all historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.—­As for Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.

She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have her history during the second century B.C.  Not till near the end of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in in any numbers.  From the dawn of the last quarter, there or thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge.  It was a time of wars civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:—­ Marius and Sulla cat and dog;—­the original Spartican movement, that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along the road to Capua;—­ended so, and not with a slave conquest and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus’s revolted slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered them with.  It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars, —­wars chronic and incurable, you would say:  the untimely wreck and ruin of the world.

It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from this time:  man after notable man arising without the qualities that could save Rome.  Here are a few of the likenesses, as they are given Dr. Stobart:  there were the Gracchi, with so much that was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,—­an idea that socialism could accomplish anything real;—­and no wisdom to see through to ultimite causes.  There was Marius, simple peasant with huge military genius:  a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws “so far as they may be legal.”  There was Sulla, of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of living made his face “like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";—­ with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi; great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited tolerance of undiscipline.  There was Crassus the millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires.  There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity:  thundering orator with more than a soupcon of the vaudeville favorite in him:  a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.