ng but the violence of
enemies could dispute the title with it. Cato, Brutus, Cassius,
Antonius, and others fell by their own hands, or by the hands of persons
who acted by their orders. Caesar, Pompeius, Cicero, and Crassus were
murdered. Nothing serves more to show how much Augustus differed from
most Romans of his century than the fact that he died in his bed at
extreme old age.

That Mr. Merivale's Caesarism does not prevent him from doing justice to
the opponents of Caesar is proved by his portrait of Q. Lutatius Catulus,
the best leader of the _optimates_, and whom he pronounces to have been
the most moderate and disinterested of all the great men of his
day,--"indeed," he adds, "there is perhaps no character in the history
of the Commonwealth which commanded more general esteem, or obtained
more blameless distinction in political life." Yet Catulus was one of
those men with whom Caesar came earliest in collision, each as the
representative of his party on vital points of difference. Our
historian's estimate of the life, labors, purposes, and character of
Pompeius is singularly correct, when we consider the temptation that he
has to underrate the man with whom Caesar has stood in direct opposition
for nineteen centuries. There are few more emphatic passages in the
historical literature of our language than the account which is given in
Vol. II. ch. 18, of the last days and death of Pompeius, and which is
followed by a most judicious summing-up of his history and position as a
Roman leader. The historian's mind appears to be strongly affected by
the fate of the Pompeian house, as much so as was the imagination of the
Romans, which it seems to have haunted. This is in part due, we presume,
to the free use which he has made of Lucan's "Pharsalia," a work of
great value to those who would understand how the grand contest for
supremacy was viewed by the beaten party in after times. That poem is
the funeral wail of the Roman aristocracy, and it embodies the ideas and
traditions of the vanquished as they existed far down into the Imperial
age. It testifies to the original vitality of the aristocratical
faction, when we find a youthful contemporary of Nero dedicating his
genius to its service more than a century after the contest had been
decided on the battlefield. Whether Lucan was a patriot, or a selfish,
but disappointed courtier, we may feel certain that he never could have
written in the Pompeian spirit, if that spi