been placed there by the magnificence of the imperial occupiers, and not of the original proprietor. In his urban gardens, or villa at Tibur, Sallust passed the close of his life, dividing his time between literary avocations and the society of his friends—among whom he numbered Lucullus, Messala, and Cornelius Nepos. Such having been his friends and studies, it seems highly improbable that he indulged in that excessive libertinism which has been attributed to him, on the erroneous supposition that he was the Sallust mentioned by Horace, in the first book of his Satires(189). The subject of Sallust’s character is one which has excited some investigation and interest, and on which very different opinions have been formed. That he was a man of loose morals is evident; and it cannot be denied that he rapaciously plundered his province, like other Roman governors of the day. But it seems doubtful if he was that monster of iniquity he has been sometimes represented. He was extremely unfortunate in the first permanent notice taken of his character by his contemporaries. The decided enemy of Pompey and his faction, he had said of that celebrated chief, in his general history, that he was a man “oris probi, animo inverecundo.” Lenæus, the freedman of Pompey, avenged his master, by the most virulent abuse of his enemy(190), in a work, which should rather be regarded as a frantic satire than an historical document. Of the injustice which he had done to the life of the historian we may, in some degree, judge, from what he said of him as an author. He called him, as we learn from Suetonius, “Nebulonem, vitâ scriptisque monstrosum: præterea, priscorum Catonisque ineruditissimum furem.” The life of Sallust, by Asconius Pedianus, which was written in the age of Augustus, and might have acted, in the present day, as a corrective, or palliative, of the unfavourable impression produced by this injurious libel, has unfortunately perished; and the next work on the subject now extant, is a professed rhetorical declamation against the character of Sallust, which was given to the world in the name of Cicero, but was not written till long after the death of that orator, and is now generally assigned by critics, to a rhetorician, in the reign of Claudius, called Porcius Latro. The calumnies invented or exaggerated by Lenæus, and propagated in the scholiastic theme of Porcius Latro, have been adopted by Le Clerc, professor of Hebrew at Amsterdam, and by Professor Meisner, of Prague(191), in their respective accounts of the Life of Sallust. His character has received more justice from the prefatory Memoir and Notes of De Brosses, his French translator, and from the researches of Wieland in Germany.