distrust of the Roman
Populace.

It was now four-and-twenty years since the city had been disturbed by
plebeian violence or aristocratic vengeance. Twenty-four years ago, the
avenging sword of Sylla had purged the state of its bloodthirsty
demagogues, and their brute followers; twenty-four years ago his powerful
hand had reestablished Rome's ancient constitution, full of checks and
balances, which secured equal rights to every Roman citizen; which secured
all equality, in short to all men, save that which no human laws can give,
equality of social rank, and equality of wealth.

The years, however, which had gone before that restoration, the dreadful
massacres and yet more dreadful proscriptions of Cinna and Marius, had
left indelible and sanguinary traces on the ancestral tree of many a noble
house; and on none deeper than on that of Hortensia's family.

Her brother, Caius Julius, an orator second to none in those days, had
been murdered by the followers of Marius, almost before his sister's eyes,
with circumstances of appalling cruelty. Her house had been forced open by
the infuriate rabble, her husband hewn down with unnumbered wounds, on his
own hearth-stone, and her first born child tossed upon the revolutionary
pike heads.

Her husband indeed recovered, almost miraculously, from his wounds, and
lived to see retribution fall upon the guilty partizans of Marius; but he
was never well again, and after languishing for years, died at last of the
wounds he received on that bloody day.

Good cause, then, had Hortensia to tremble at the tender mercies of the
people.

Nor, though they struck the minds of these high-born ladies with less
perplexity and awe than the vulgar souls without, were the portents and
horrors of the heaven, without due effect. No mind in those days, however
clear and enlightened, but held some lingering belief that such things
were ominous of coming wrath, and sent by the Gods to inform their
faithful worshippers.

It was moreover fresh in her memory, how two years before, during the
consulship of Cotta and Torquatus, in a like terrible night-storm, the
fire from heaven had stricken down the highest turrets of the capitol,
melted the brazen tables of the law, and scathed the gilded effigy of
Romulus and Remus, sucking their shaggy foster-mother, which stood on the
Capitoline.

The augurs in those days, collected from Etruria and all parts of Italy,
after long consultation, had proclaimed th