The primitive history of Rome is as difficult to reduce to pure historic truth as that of Athens, or any other city of antiquity; this proceeds from its being principally founded on traditions, handled by poets and rhetoricians, and likewise differing from one another; as may be seen in Plutarch's Romulus. As the knowledge of those traditions, such as they are found in Dionysius and Livy, attaches to so many other subjects, it would be improper to pass them over in silence; and that they contained truths as well as poetic fictions is proved most evidently by the political institutions of which they narrate the origin, and which certainly reached back to those times. To attempt to draw a line of demarcation between mythical and historic times would be to mistake the real nature of mythology. L. DE BEAUFORT, _Sur l'incertitude des cinq premiers siecles de l'histoire Romaine_, nouv. ed. a la Haye, 1750, 2 vols. 8vo. Every thing that can be said against the credibility of the primitive Roman history has been developed by Beaufort with abundant, and often with laboured, acuteness. 3. During the first two hundred and forty-five years subsequent to its foundation this city was under the rule of governors, denominated kings; these, however, were not hereditary, still less were they invested with unlimited power, although they exerted themselves to become both perpetual and absolute. On the contrary, in this period was framed a municipal constitution, demonstrative of the existence, even at this early date, of a considerable degree of political civilization; in its principal parts this constitution was, no doubt,--as in every colony,--copied from that of the mother city. Its principal features were: _a._ Establishment and internal organization of the senate. _b._ Establishment and progress of the patrician or hereditary nobility, which, supported by the privilege of administering the sacred affairs, and by the introduction of family names, quickly formed, in opposition to the plebeians, a political party ever growing in power, although not, therefore, a mere sacerdotal caste. _c._ Organization of the people (_populus_), and modes of popular assembly (_comitia_), founded thereupon; besides the original division according to heads into _tribus_ and _curiae_, another was subsequently introduced according to property into _classes_ and _centuriae_, out of which, besides the more ancient _comitia curiata_, arose the very artificially constructed _comitia centuriata_. _d._ Religious institutions, (_religiones_,) which being most closely connected with the political constitution, formed a state religion, by means of which everything in the state was attached to determined forms, and received a higher sanction. Nor must we omit _e._ the relations in private life established by law, the clientship, marriage, and especially paternal authority. In consequence of those