hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her _gravitas,_--which
implied great things;--but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when
a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by
maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of
things--she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But
think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an
essential part of government; or of France, with her _Ministre
des Beaux Arts_ in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all
historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you
must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.--As for
Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find
another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it
as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when
Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.

She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have
her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end
of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in
in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or
thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous
toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars
civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and
massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:--
Marius and Sulla cat and dog;--the original Spartican movement,
that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along
the road to Capua;--ended so, and not with a slave conquest
and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus's revolted
slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that
Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered
them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars,
--wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck
and ruin of the world.

It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from
this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities
that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they
are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that
was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,--an idea
that socialism could accomplish anything real;--and no wisdom to
see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant
with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb
of a politician; a law-maker