Marcellus, and Marcellus received permission to return to Rome; but Cato was of an unmalleable nature, and preferred, to an ignoble silence in Italy, the noble silence of the grave. He died "after the high Roman fashion." Suicide might be called the natural death of a Roman leader of that age, and nothing but the violence of enemies could dispute the title with it. Cato, Brutus, Cassius, Antonius, and others fell by their own hands, or by the hands of persons who acted by their orders. Caesar, Pompeius, Cicero, and Crassus were murdered. Nothing serves more to show how much Augustus differed from most Romans of his century than the fact that he died in his bed at extreme old age. That Mr. Merivale's Caesarism does not prevent him from doing justice to the opponents of Caesar is proved by his portrait of Q. Lutatius Catulus, the best leader of the _optimates_, and whom he pronounces to have been the most moderate and disinterested of all the great men of his day,--"indeed," he adds, "there is perhaps no character in the history of the Commonwealth which commanded more general esteem, or obtained more blameless distinction in political life." Yet Catulus was one of those men with whom Caesar came earliest in collision, each as the representative of his party on vital points of difference. Our historian's estimate of the life, labors, purposes, and character of Pompeius is singularly correct, when we consider the temptation that he has to underrate the man with whom Caesar has stood in direct opposition for nineteen centuries. There are few more emphatic passages in the historical literature of our language than the account which is given in Vol. II. ch. 18, of the last days and death of Pompeius, and which is followed by a most judicious summing-up of his history and position as a Roman leader. The historian's mind appears to be strongly affected by the fate of the Pompeian house, as much so as was the imagination of the Romans, which it seems to have haunted. This is in part due, we presume, to the free use which he has made of Lucan's "Pharsalia," a work of great value to those who would understand how the grand contest for supremacy was viewed by the beaten party in after times. That poem is the funeral wail of the Roman aristocracy, and it embodies the ideas and traditions of the vanquished as they existed far down into the Imperial age. It testifies to the original vitality of the aristocratical faction, when we find a youthful contemporary of Nero dedicating his genius to its service more than a century after the contest had been decided on the battlefield. Whether Lucan was a patriot, or a selfish, but disappointed courtier, we may feel certain that he never could have written in the Pompeian spirit, if that spirit was not still dominant in the minds of a large number of those men and women who formed the most cultivated portion of Roman society. To a critical historian, such as Mr.