Thus were the complicated and contradictory principles of Roman government exchanged for the simplicity of monarchical rule; an exchange most desirable for the peace and security of the subjects of the government. The empire was no longer shaken with the constant vacillations of supremacy from the aristocracy to the democracy, and from the democracy to the demagogues, alternately their tyrants and their slaves. The solitary tyranny of an emperor was occasionally found terrible in some of its details, but the worst of these could never outgo the republican cruelties of Marius and Sylla, and there was, at least, this one advantage on the side of those suffering under the monarchical tyranny, which would not be available in the case of the victims of mob-despotism. This was the ease with which a single stroke with a well-aimed dagger could remove the evil at once, and secure some chance of a change for the better, as was the case with Caligula, Nero, and Domitian; and though the advantages of the change were much more manifest in the two latter cases than in the former, yet, even in that, the relief experienced was worth the effort. But a whole tyrannical populace could not be so easily and summarily disposed of; and those who suffered by such despotism, could only wait till the horrible butcheries of civil strife, or the wasting carnage of foreign warfare, had used up the energies and the superfluous blood of the populace, and swept the flower of the democracy, by legions, to a wide and quiet grave. The remedy of the evil was therefore much slower, and more undesirable in its operation, in this case, than in the other; while the evil itself was actually more widely injurious. For, on the one hand, what imperial tyrant ever sacrificed so many victims in Rome, or produced such wide-wasting ruin, as either of those republican chiefs, Marius and Sylla? And on the other hand, when, in the most glorious and peaceful days of the aristocratic or democratic sway, did military glory, literature, science, art, commerce, and the whole common weal, so flourish and advance, as under the imperial Augustus, the sage Vespasian and the amiable Titus, the heroic Trajan, the polished Adrian, or the wise and philosophic Antonines? Never did Rome wear the aspect of a truly majestic city, till the imperial pride of her long line of Caesars had filled her with the temples, amphitheaters, circuses, aqueducts, baths, triumphal columns and arches, which to this day perpetuate the solid glory of the founders, and make her the wonder of the world, while not one surviving great work of art claims a republican for its author. To such a glory did the Caesars raise her, and from such a splendor did she fade, as now.