But with sufficient discernment to see the follies and vices of his age, and with sufficient virtue to detest them, Tacitus must have found his love of wisdom and goodness, of liberty and law, strengthened by the very disorders and faults of the times. If the patriot ever loves a well-regulated freedom, it will be in and after the reign of a tyrant, preceded or followed by what is still worse, anarchy. If the pure and the good ever reverence purity and goodness, it will be amid the general prevalence of vice and crime. If the sage ever pants after wisdom, it is when the fountains of knowledge have become corrupted. The reigns of Nero and his immediate successors were probably the very school, of all others, to which we are most indebted for the comprehensive wisdom, the elevated sentiments, and the glowing eloquence of the biographer of Agricola, and the historian of the Roman Empire. His youth saw, and felt, and deplored the disastrous effects of Nero's inhuman despotism, and of the anarchy attending the civil wars of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. His manhood saw, and felt, and exulted in the contrast furnished by the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, though the sun of the latter too soon went down, in that long night of gloom, and blood, and terror, the tyranny of Domitian. And when, in the reigns of Nerva and Trajan, he enjoyed the rare felicity of thinking what he pleased, and speaking what he thought, he was just fitted in the maturity of his faculties, and the extent of his observation and reflections, "to enroll slowly, year after year, that dreadful reality of crimes and sufferings, which even dramatic horror, in all its license of wild imagination, can scarcely reach, the long unvarying catalogue of tyrants and executioners, and victims that return thanks to the gods and die, and accusers rich with their blood, and more mighty as more widely hated, amid the multitudes of prostrate slaves, still looking whether there may not yet have escaped some lingering virtue which it may be a merit to destroy, and having scarcely leisure to feel even the agonies of remorse in the continued sense of the precariousness of their own gloomy existence." [Brown's Philosophy of the Mind.]