In this utter break-down of all fixed principles which, in a heathen age, necessarily resulted from the substitution of one great empire for a multitude of minute republics; and in the complete isolation in which it left every individual, when he lost the idea of that duty to his country and his country's traditions which had been the moral law of his ancestors, M. de Champagny sees the explanation of the fact, so hard to account for, that men whose fathers had been proud nobles of free and lordly Rome should have submitted as they did to such a tyranny as that of Tiberius. For his was not one of those which are supported by the sword. In Italy he had only about 9,000 men under arms, and even they were scattered in the neighbourhood of the city. Yet the Senate allowed itself to be decimated, its chief members cut off day by day. It seems as if each man thought only of himself, and calculated that although, of course, none could be safe, he was safer by remaining quiet, and taking his chance, than he would be by boldly appealing to the Senate and people to put an end to the protracted massacre, by depriving the tyrant of his power. The circumstance which, perhaps, is most revolting to our feelings as Englishmen in the tyranny of the bad Emperor is, that it was hardly possible to draw a line between an execution and an assassination. A great man, untried, nay, so far as he knew, unaccused, was suddenly roused from his sleep by the arrival of half a dozen soldiers, who came to put him to death on the spot, or, perhaps, as a great favour, to bring him the commands of the Emperor that he should kill himself. How does this differ from an assassination, except in the assured impunity of the murderers? Yet, so common was it, that when the Emperor Pertinax was suddenly awakened on the night in which Commodus had been slain, by those who brought him the offer of the purple, he took for granted that he was to die. The feelings with which we regard such proceedings have been formed by the immemorial law of our country (which not even Henry VIII., in his wildest excess of tyranny, ever dared to violate, except in a few cases, in which he obtained an Act of Parliament, to authorize its violation)--that no man can be condemned without trial. The Roman law, during the best days of the Republic, carried the notion of 'strong government' farther than even our neighbours in France would like. Within the walls of Rome there was an appeal to the people from the sentence of any magistrate; everywhere else, a consul or other officer holding the 'imperium' might order whom he pleased to be beheaded by his lictors, without trial. This, no doubt, was because, outside the city, the office of a Roman consul was purely military. But this 'martial law' prepared men's minds for the abuse of the same discretion within the city itself by the Cæsars, whose position, as everybody knows, was, legally, only that they were servants of the Republic, privileged to