rate to the
energetic hardihood of a slave--who, by way of answer and reprisal to an
edict summarily consigning him to persecution and death, determines to
cross Europe in quest of its author, though no less a person than the
master of the world--to seek him out in the inmost recesses of his
capital city, of his private palace, of his consecrated bed-chamber--and
there to lodge a dagger in his heart, as the adequate reply to the
imperial sentence of proscription against himself.

Such, amidst the superhuman grandeur and hallowed privileges of the
Roman emperor's office, were the extraordinary perils which menaced the
individual officer. The office rose by its grandeur to a region above
the clouds and vapors of earth: the officer might find his personal
security as unsubstantial as those wandering vapors. Nor is it possible
that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better
illustrated than in this tale of Herodian. Whilst the emperor's mighty
arms were stretched out to arrest some potentate in the heart of Asia, a
poor slave is silently and stealthily creeping round the base of the
Alps, with the purpose of winning his way as a murderer to the imperial
bed-chamber; Caesar is watching some potent rebel of the Orient, at a
distance of two thousand leagues, and he overlooks the dagger which is
within three stealthy steps, and one tiger's leap, of his own heart. All
the heights and the depths which belong to man's frailty, all the
contrasts of glory and meanness, the extremities of what is highest and
lowest in human casualties, meeting in the station of the Roman Caesar
Semper Augustus--have combined to call him into high marble relief, and
to make him the most interesting study of all whom history has
emblazoned with colors of fire and blood, or has crowned most lavishly
with diadems of cyprus and laurel.

XLV. UNTHOUGHTFULNESS.

DR. ARNOLD.--1795-1842.

_A Lecture delivered in Rugby Chapel._

The state of spiritual folly is, I suppose, one of the most universal
evils in the world. For the number of those who are naturally foolish is
exceedingly great; of those, I mean, who understand no worldly thing
well; of those who are careless about everything, carried about by every
breath of opinion, without knowledge, and without principle. But the
term spiritual folly includes, unhappily, a great many more than these;
it takes in not those only who are in the common sense of the term
foolish, but a great