ef causes of the rebellion. "There were," he says,
"an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so
educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous
men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity
and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by
that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of
tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and
out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or
if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence
were always able to sway the rest." To this charge Hobbes returns again
and again, even declaring that "the universities have been to this nation
as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans." And the uncompromising monarchist
of the _Leviathan_, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be
known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his
accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and
Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the
French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite,
equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts:

There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
Who all the day enacts--a woollen-draper.

And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the
champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their
lips.

So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the classics
offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of
intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the
similar lesson of time. It is a true saying of our ancient humanist that
"the longer it continueth in a name or lineage, the more is nobility
extolled and marvelled at." It is true because in this way our imagination
is working with the great conservative law of growth. Whatever may be in
theory our democratic distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get
away from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and that
we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble name. There is
nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English statesman has put it,
"the past is one of the elements of our power." He is the wise democrat
who, with no opposition to such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control
its