fatal moment approached. Cato called for his freed-man, and asked him if all was quiet; and when he was assured that it was, he threw himself upon the bed as if to take his repose for the night; but the moment he was left alone, he plunged the sword into his body a little below the breast. The blow did not kill him at once; he struggled a little, and fell off the bed on to the ground. At the noise of his fall, his people rushed in, and, as he still breathed, his surgeon bound up the wound. But the instant he recovered his senses, he tore away the bandages, and with them dragged out his bowels, and expired. “Oh, Cato!” cried Cæsar, when he heard of his noble end, “I envy thee the glory of thy death, since thou hast envied me that of sparing thy life.” And he entered triumphantly into Utica. Without entering into the question of suicide in general, or that which would lead to a much longer digression than we can afford,--the strange mania for self-destruction which possessed the Romans of this age,--we cannot help observing that this celebrated death of Cato reads more like a dramatic scene than a reality. Why, if his son and his friends had been in earnest, when they knew of his intention, they ought to have bound him, hand and foot, and never have left him alone a minute. The man’s mind was weakened with trouble, and he ought to have been treated like a maniac. Such is the modern, or common sense view of the case; but the noblest of the Romans thought far otherwise. Stoicism, the favourite philosophy of the day, taught them to despise life without honour and freedom; and there must have been something exalted in this creed, for, whilst we constantly find great public men, for public reasons, laying violent hands upon themselves, we do not learn that the practice extended to persons affected by disappointed passions, or suffering under private calamities. We called it a mania--when we glance at this one point of history, it can be called nothing else: Cato, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra, Porcia, all playing in one short scene of the great drama; all contemporaries, and acted upon, in some way, by each other, all destroyed themselves, and all without a common-sense reason for doing so. ABYDOS. A.C. 201. We now come to a siege which, from being unconnected with any rise or fall of empires, or being made or resisted by any extraordinary personages, may be passed by without particular notice by many readers of history; and yet what horrors are crowded into this short scene; what a picture it presents for human nature to shudder at!