three different names; one whereof was ever kept secret--while the other two referred to its blooming strength and ever enduring power. The ancient cities of the Greeks, those of the Italian nations, whether akin to them, or otherwise, possessed indeed their tutelary deities, their particular sanctuaries, their highly revered Palladium, some ancient oracles, and certain religious rites and festivals consecrated to their honour. But it would not be easy to find another example where the traditionary reverence, we might almost say, the old hereditary deification of the city, had from the earliest period, taken such deep root in the minds of men; and where such a formal worship was so intimately interwoven with manners, customs, and even maxims of state, as among the Romans. And when an universal monarchy had sprung out from this single city, it was still that city--it was still eternal Rome that was ever regarded, not merely as the centre, but as the essence of the whole--the personified conception of the state--the grand idea of the empire. The early traditions of the Romans which, though from the commencement of the city they assume the garb of authentic history, (as in the pages of Livy for instance,) yet are for a long time to be regarded mostly as mere traditions,--evince a fact well entitled to our consideration,--as it serves to show how that strong, inflexible, but harsh, Roman character, such as the later records of history display, manifested itself even in the earliest infancy of this people;--it is this, that among no other nation, did historical recollections even of the remotest antiquity exert such a powerful influence on life, or strike so deep a root in the minds of men. Nearly five hundred years had elapsed since the time of the elder Brutus, when, in the Roman world now so mightily changed, a citizen appealed to the second Brutus in these words--"Brutus, thou sleepest"--as if to urge him to that deed which the first had perpetrated on the proud Tarquin, and by which that celebrated name had become identified with the idea of a bold deliverer. An ardent hatred towards all kings, and towards royalty itself, which from that period remained ever deeply fixed in the Roman mind, characterised this people even in the most ancient period of their history. Not only in the remarks and reflections of the later Roman historians on the first ages of Rome, but in facts themselves, as in the case of Spurius Cassius, we may trace the natural concomitant of this hatred--a passionate jealousy of all powerful party-chiefs, and democratic leaders, who were, perhaps suspected, or probably convicted of aspiring to supreme power in the state, and aiming at the establishment of tyranny--as if the Romans had even then a clear presentiment of the inevitable fate that awaited an empire like theirs, and of the quarter whence their ruin would proceed. Even in the first ages, the Patricians and Plebeians appear on the