And here I must ask you to learn with me a little piece of Roman history. I say, to _learn_ with me, because I don't know any Roman history except the two first books of Livy, and little bits here and there of the following six or seven. I only just know enough about it to be able to make out the bearings and meaning of any fact that I now learn. The greater number of modern historians know, (if honest enough even for that,) the facts, or something that may possibly be like the facts, but haven't the least notion of the meaning of them. So that, though I have to find out everything that I want in Smith's dictionary, like any schoolboy, I can usually tell you the {142} significance of what I so find, better than perhaps even Mr. Smith himself could. 18. In the 586th page of Mr. Smith's volume, you have it written that 'Calvus,' bald-head, was the name of a family of the Licinia gens; that the man of whom we hear earliest, as so named, was the first plebeian elected to military tribuneship in B.C. 400; and that the fourth of whom we hear, was surnamed 'Stolo,' because he was so particular in pruning away the Stolons (stolones), or useless young shoots, of his vines. We must keep this word 'stolon,' therefore, for these young suckers springing from an old root. Its derivation is uncertain; but the main idea meant by it is one of uselessness,--sprouting without occasion or fruit; and the words 'stolidus' and 'stolid' are really its derivatives, though we have lost their sense in English by partly confusing them with 'solid' which they have nothing to do with. A 'stolid' person is essentially a 'useless sucker' of society; frequently very leafy and graceful, but with no good in him. [Illustration: FIG. 15.] 19. Nevertheless, I won't allow our vegetable 'stolons' to be despised. Some of quite the most beautiful forms of leafage belong to them;--even the foliage of the olive itself is never seen to the same perfection on the upper branches as in the young ground-rods in which the dual groups of leaves crowd themselves in their haste into clusters of three. But, for our point of Latin history, remember always {143} that in 400 B.C., just a year before the death of Socrates at Athens, this family of Stolid persons manifested themselves at Rome, shooting up from plebeian roots into places where they had no business; and preparing the way for the degradation of the entire Roman race under the Empire; their success being owed, remember also, to the faults of the patricians, for one of the laws passed by Calvus Stolo was that the Sibylline books should be in custody of ten men, of whom five should be plebeian, "that no falsifications might be introduced in favour of the patricians."