sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history,
composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The
Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and
to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric
of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields
such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
flicker in the eighteenth century.

Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
itself? Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
contrast, to discover wh