ity of life. And this is Mr. Finlay's
inference. Otherwise, and for our own parts, we should be inclined to
charge her long tenure of independence upon her strong situation,
rendered for _her_ a thousand times stronger by the two facts of her
commerce in the first place, and secondly, of her commerce being
maritime. Shipping and trade seem to us the two anchors by which she
rode.

[14] 'Nook-shotten,' an epithet applied by Shakspeare to England.

[15] Christianity is a force of unity. But was Paganism such? No. To be
idolatrous is no bond of union.

[16] See Murder as one of the Fine Arts. (Postscript in 1854.)

[17] '_Under the same tactics_'--the tactics of 'refusing' her columns
to the enemy. On this subject we want an elaborate memoir
historico-geographical revising every stage of the Roman warfare in
Pers-Armenia, from Crassus and Ventidius down to Heraclius--a range of
six and a half centuries; and specifically explaining why it was that
almost always the Romans found it mere destruction to attempt a passage
much beyond the Tigris or into central Persia, whilst so soon after
Heraclius the immediate successors of Mahomet overflowed Persia like a
deluge.

[18] 'Intestine war.' Many writers call the Peloponnesian war (by the
way, a very false designation) the great _civil_ war of Greece.
'Civil'!--it might have been such, had the Grecian states had a central
organ which claimed a common obedience.

_III. THE ASSASSINATION OF CAESAR._

The assassination of Caesar, we find characterized in one of his latter
works (_Farbenlehre_, Theil 2, p. 126) by Goethe, as '_die
abgeschmackteste That die jemals begangen worden_'--_the most
outrageously absurd act that ever was committed_. Goethe is right, and
more than right. For not only was it an atrocity so absolutely without a
purpose as never to have been examined by one single conspirator with a
view to its probable tendencies--in that sense therefore it was absurd
as pointing to no result--but also in its immediate arrangements and
precautions it had been framed so negligently, with a carelessness so
total as to the natural rebounds and reflex effects of such a tragic
act, that the conspirators had neither organized any resources for
improving their act, nor for securing their own persons from the first
blind motions of panic, nor even for establishing a common rendezvous.
When they had executed their valiant exploit, the very possibility of
which from the fi