ate--once the most grave and stern and just assembly that the world
had seen--was now, with but a few superb exceptions, a timid, faithless,
and licentious oligarchy; while--name whilome so majestical and mighty!--the
people, the great Roman people, was but a mob! a vile colluvion of the
offscourings of all climes and regions--Greeks, Syrians, Africans,
Barbarians from the chilly north, and eunuchs from the vanquished Orient,
enfranchised slaves, and liberated gladiators--a factious, turbulent,
fierce rabble!

Such was the state of Rome, when it would seem that the Gods, wearied with
the guilt of her aggrandisement, sick of the slaughter by which she had
won her way to empire almost universal, had judged her to destruction--had
given her up to perish, not by the hands of any foreign foe, but by her
own; not by the wisdom, conduct, bravery of others, but by her own
insanity and crime.

But at this darkest season of the state one hope was left to Rome--one
safeguard. The united worth of Cicero and Cato! The statesmanship, the
eloquence, the splendid and unequalled parts of the former; the stern
self-denying virtue, the unchanged constancy, the resolute and hard
integrity of the latter; these, singular and severally, might have availed
to prop a falling dynasty--united, might have preserved a world!

The night was such as has already been described: gloomy and lowering in
its character, as was the aspect of the political horizon, and most
congenial to the fearful plots, which were even now in progress against
the lives of Rome's best citizens, against the sanctity of her most solemn
temples, the safety of her domestic hearths, the majesty of her inviolable
laws, the very existence of her institutions, of her empire, of herself as
one among the nations of the earth.

Most suitable, indeed, was that dim murky night, most favorable the
solitude of the deserted streets, to the measures of those parricides of
the Republic, who lurked within her bosom, thirsty for blood, and panting
to destroy. Nor had they overlooked the opportunity. But a few days
remained before that on which the Consular elections, fixed for the
eighteenth of October, were to take place in the Campus Martius--whereat,
it was already understood that Sergius Cataline, frustrated the preceding
year, by the election of the great orator of Arpinum to his discomfiture,
was about once more to try the fortunes of himself and of the popular
faction.

It was at t