on of all
responsibilities. Anthony began to be uneasy about him; the
Senatorial Party to make advances to him; people began to
suspect that, possibly, this sickly boy might grow into a man to
be reckoned with.

I am not going to follow him in detail through the next thirteen
years. It is a tortuous difficult story; to which we lack the
true clues, unless they are to be found in the series of
protrait-busts of him taken during this period. The makers of
such busts were the photographers of the age; and, you may say,
as good as the best photographers. Every prominent Roman availed
himself of their services. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his _Tragedy of
the Caesars,_ arranges, examines, and interprets these portraits
of Augustus; I shall give you the gist of his conclusions,
which are illuminating.--First we see a boy with delicate and
exceedingly beautiful features, impassive and unawakend:
Octavius when he came to Rome. A cloud gathers on his face,
deepening into a look of intense anguish; and with the anguish
grows firmness and the clenched expression of an iron will: this
is Octavian in the dark days of the thirties.--the anguish
passes, but leaves the firmness behind: the strength remains,
the beauty remains, and a light of high serenity has taken the
place of the aspect of pain: this is Augustus the Emperor. The
same writer contrasts this story with that revealed by the busts
of Julius: wherein we see first a gay insouciant dare-devil
youth, and at last a man old before his time; a face sinister (I
should say) and haunted with ugly sorrow.

We get no contemporary account of Augustus; no interpeting
biography from the hand of any one who knew him. We have to read
between the lines of history, and with what intuition we can
muster: and especially the story of that lonely soul struggling
through the awful waters of the years that followed Caesar's
death. We see him allying himself first with one party, then
with another; exercising (apparently) no great or brilliant
qualities, yet by every change thrown nearer the top; till with
Anthony and Lepidus he is one of the Triumvirate that rules the
world. Then came those cruel proscriptions. This is the picture
commonly seen:--a cold keen intellect perpetually dissembling;
keen enough to deceive Anthony, to decieve the senate, to decieve
Cicero and all the world; cruel for policy's sake, without ever
a twinge of remorse or compunciton: a marble-cold impassive
_m