then the Memoirs of Rutilius and of Sylla; in later times, perhaps Asinius Pollio, Theophanes, and others. The farther he advanced, the nearer he came to the work for which he was really fitted, only he had unfortunately become old in the meanwhile. The delineation of the character of Cicero from Livy in M. Seneca’s _Suasoria_, is done in a masterly style. One is more and more convinced how richly Livy was endowed with a talent for description and narration of the kind which we prize in the novelists of our time. What he is utterly deficient in, is comprehensiveness of view. He often takes from an annalist an account, which presupposes quite different circumstances from those which he himself has set forth. Wherever he wants to give a summary, one sees that what a little while since he had written, nay, even what he had quite close before him, was not at all present to his mind. Thus the enumeration of the nations which fell off immediately after the battle of Cannæ is entirely wrong, there being several among them who only revolted some years afterwards. He shows himself to be no critic in the war of Hannibal, where he repeats the tales which Cœlius Antipater only could have devised; and moreover we find in him an entire absence of judgment with regard to an event and the actors in it, whether they were right or wrong. In early life, he was on Pompey’s side; that is to say, a partisan of that chaos which had grown up out of the Roman constitution. He was then very young, being only ten years old when Cæsar came to Italy. This bygone time before the dictatorship of Cæsar, appeared to his imagination as a golden age. Thus a friend of my youth, a Frenchman and a staunch royalist, remarked to me, that the French nobles who at the outbreak of the Revolution were still young, were the most fiercely zealous against its ideas, and looked upon the period immediately preceding it as a time of the highest felicity. Livy seems to have been one of those men who never put to themselves the question, What ought then to have happened, if matters had not come to a crisis? Yet it is natural that after Cæsar’s victory noble minds should have inclined to Pompey, who seemed to uphold the ancient usages and constitution; and it is only now that we are able to recognise Cæsar to have been the most beneficial of the two leaders. Livy, moreover, applies his party names to persons and to circumstances which were quite different, and he looks upon every thing that belongs to the tribunes as seditious. When he tells us of Tarquin the Proud, how he usurped the dominion over the Latins, and how Turnus Herdonius, evidently with the greatest justice, withstood him, he calls the latter _homo seditiosus, iisque artibus potentiam nactus_. Thus Livy must have proverbially become what is called in France an Ultra. In this sense Augustus called him a Pompeian; though he did not fear him, because no real effects were to be expected from such daydreams.