stop to anything that was hostile to him. When the corpse of Augustus had been brought to Rome, and his ashes entombed in the Mausoleum, the funeral orations having been spoken by Tiberius and his son Drusus; the step was still to be taken by which Tiberius had to put himself in the possession of the supreme power. He now showed at once a remarkable duplicity: he was not a coward on the field of battle; yet he was uncommonly afraid of attempts upon his life. He had carried his dissimulation to a pitch of refinement, being one of those persons who can never make up their minds to speak out, but must be guessed; like Cromwell, to whom he otherwise has no resemblance: such men are not seldom met with in every-day life, and they are quite unbearable. Tiberius wished to have before the world the appearance of a moral man, and yet to give himself quietly up to all sorts of excesses: he never uttered what he really thought, for fear of saying something too much. With this character, he played the farce with which the work of Tacitus most painfully begins. There it is told at some length how he refused to take the reins of government, and made the senate urge him to do it for the sake of the common good. When he saw that he tired the people, he yielded so far as to compel them to force him. The first beginning of his reign is marked by a mutiny of the troops in Illyricum and on the Rhine. It was one of the institutions of Augustus, that the legions had permanent camps on the frontiers, in which they were stationed until the men were superannuated: after having served a number of years, these were for some time longer to be kept up as a reserve _sub vexillis_ in the provinces, as Augustus wanted to have as many old soldiers who had seen service as possible; and then at length they were to become quite free, and the whole legion was disbanded, and a military colony established for it. This system was a terrible one for the provinces and for the soldiers; but in a military point of view it was admirably suited for the protection of the empire. Now were new legions first formed and sent out. Yet what had been promised the soldiers, had not been made good to them, and they had had to remain much longer under arms than they ought: in this state of things, the soldier became the terror of every one, being himself frightfully oppressed and plundered by his officers. The detailed account of this outbreak in Tacitus, is excellent. Drusus overcame the danger in Illyricum; Germanicus, on the Rhine. In reality, however, the government had to give way: the ringleaders were punished, but the rest got their relief, and had the advantages of the reserve secured to them.