None of our illuminated readers will fall down into that exalted, but still very common mistake, of supposing that the great mass of the men, women, and children, living here in the latter half of that seventeenth century, were all the while, or indeed to any great extent, occupied by, interested in, or even measurably affected by, these large public events. The old man who thought it strange that all the millions of people in the Roman Empire, who he naturally supposed, from his reading of history, were present at the killing of Cæsar, did not rise against Brutus, Cassius, and the rest and prevent it, is now dead, but he has left successors to his historical notions. Most people are just as apt to think that everybody at Jerusalem knew King David as certainly as the Skibbareen Irishman that every American whom he meets in Ireland must be acquainted with his cousin whose going off from Skibbareen was so well understood there. Louis Napoleon, in his Life of Cæsar, may magnify the importance and influence over his times of his self-reflecting hero; but we all know that, in fact, as soon as the large imperial microscope is taken off from the single spot, Cæsar goes back again into a speck on the broad Roman sheet. To the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Romans in one hundred thousand, it was practically of less consequence whether Cæsar, Antony, or Julius Scipio Smith ruled Rome, than whether the season was wet or dry, or whether their wives and children kept well and healthy. To the few around the court, to the mammas with eligible daughters just in the city of Rome, to a few vestimentary Jenkins who retailed to the dozen families of their set the latest scandals on the Palatine, it was a matter of some moment; to the farmers, mechanics, working-people paving the wide empire with their labor and patient, endless industries, of comparatively little consequence whatever. Doubtless great numbers of these hard-working Romans, in those unfortunate towns where there were no presses or telegraphs, lived forty, fifty, or sixty years after “great Cæsar had turned to clay,” without suspecting that he was not decorated china still at Rome; without dreaming that, while they themselves had been raising pulse and sour wine for their own little house sovereigns in Gaul or Germania, Augustus had succeeded to Cæsar’s power at the capitol, and had set those scribblers, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, to writing, and had made much history for Bohemians since. Little did they know that Tiberius had meanwhile succeeded Augustus and crucified more men at that Roman New York than he had hairs on his hard pate, and so kept on the imperial pastime with a keen appetite, until he was served with the same sauce that he had dished out so freely; nor had they ever heard tell that during the same interval, so uneventful for them in their far-off silent occupations, Caligula had crawled up to the place