it is but justice
that we should turn away to contemplate those situations in which that
same intellect showed itself preternaturally strong. To face a sudden
danger by a corresponding weight of sudden counsel or sudden
evasion--_that_ was a privilege essentially lodged in the Roman mind.
But in every nation some minds much more than others are representative
of the national type: they are normal minds, reflecting, as in a focus,
the characteristics of the race. Thus Louis XIV. has been held to be the
idealized expression of the French character; and among the Romans there
can not be a doubt that the first Caesar offers in a rare perfection the
revelation of that peculiar grandeur which belonged to the children of
Romulus.

What _was_ that grandeur? We do not need, in this place, to attempt its
analysis. One feature will suffice for our purpose. The late celebrated
John Foster, in his essay on decision of character, among the accidents
of life which might serve to strengthen the natural tendencies to such a
character, or to promote its development, rightly insists on
_desertion_. To find itself in solitude, and still more to find itself
thrown upon that state of abandonment by sudden treachery, crushes the
feeble mind, but rouses a terrific reaction of haughty self-assertion in
that order of spirits which matches and measures itself against
difficulty and danger. There is something corresponding to this case of
human treachery in the sudden caprices of fortune. A danger, offering
itself unexpectedly in some momentary change of blind external agencies,
assumes to the feelings the character of a perfidy accomplished by
mysterious powers, and calls forth something of the same resentment, and
in a gladiatorial intellect something of the same spontaneous
resistance. A sword that breaks in the very crisis of a duel, a horse
killed by a flash of lightning in the moment of collision with the
enemy, a bridge carried away by an avalanche at the instant of a
commencing retreat, affect the feelings like dramatic incidents
emanating from a human will. This man they confound and paralyze, that
man they rouse into resistance, as by a personal provocation and insult.
And if it happens that these opposite effects show themselves in cases
wearing a national importance, they raise what would else have been a
mere casualty into the tragic or the epic grandeur of a fatality. The
superb character, for instance, of Caesar's intellect throws a