urning of a sentinel round a corner, or the
casual echo of a footstep. Dynasties have trepidated on the chances of a
sudden cry from an infant carried in a basket; and the safety of empires
has been suspended, like the descent of an avalanche, upon the moment
earlier or the moment later of a cough or a sneeze. And, high above all,
ascends solemnly the philosophic truth, that the least things and the
greatest are bound together as elements equally essential of the
mysterious universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] "Feels by a secret instinct;"--A sentiment of this nature is finely
expressed by Lucan in the passage beginning, "Advenisse diem," &c. The
circumstance by which Lucan chiefly defeats the grandeur and
simplicities of the truth, is, the monstrous numerical exaggeration of
the combatants and the killed at Pharsalia.

[E] It is very evident that Dr. Arnold could not have understood the
position of politics in Rome, when he allowed himself to make a favorite
of Pompey. The doctor hated aristocrats as he hated the gates of Erebus.
Now Pompey was not only the leader of a most selfish aristocracy, but
also their tool. Secondly, as if this were not bad enough, that section
of the aristocracy to which he had dedicated his services was an odious
oligarchy; and to this oligarchy, again, though nominally its head, he
was in effect the most submissive of tools. Caesar, on the other hand, if
a democrat in the sense of working by democratic agencies, was bending
all his efforts to the reconstruction of a new, purer, and enlarged
aristocracy, no longer reduced to the necessity of buying and selling
the people in mere self-defense. The everlasting war of bribery,
operating upon universal poverty, the internal disease of Roman society,
would have been redressed by Caesar's measures, and _was_ redressed
according to the degree in which those measures were really brought into
action. New judicatures were wanted, new judicial laws, a new
aristocracy, by slow degrees a new people, and the right of suffrage
exercised within new restrictions--all these things were needed for the
cleansing of Rome; and that Caesar would have accomplished this labor of
Hercules was the true cause of his death. The scoundrels of the
oligarchy felt their doom to be approaching. It was the just remark of
Napoleon, that Brutus (but still more, we may say, Cicero), though
falsely accredited as a patriot, was, in fact, the most exclusive and
the most selfish of aristocr