generosity, and give a certain colour of magnanimity to their acts, in the eyes of a gazing and terrified world. Thus, for instance, after the defeat of Philip, King of Macedon, they declared to deluded Greece that she was free; and again, Antiochus the Great, whose arrogance had given offence to many, and whose overthrow was in consequence the subject of very general joy, was compelled to cede the Lesser Asia as far as Mount Taurus; and the victors gave away the conquered provinces and kingdoms to the Princes in their alliance, and affected not to have the intention of subduing and keeping all for themselves. For it was yet much too soon to let the unconquered states and nations perceive that all, without distinction, were destined, one after the other, to become the provinces of the all-absorbing empire of Rome. Thus now overpassing the limits of Greece, the Romans had obtained a firm footing in Asia; and this first step was soon enough to be succeeded by other and still further advances. Historians have often remarked the decisive moment when Cæsar, after an instant's reflection and delay, crossed the Rubicon; but we may ask now, when Rome herself had passed her Rubicon, where was that historical limit--that last boundary-line of ambition, after passing which no return, no halt were possible; if now, when all right, all justice, every human term and limit to ambition were lost sight of, if now idolized Rome in the fulness of her Pagan pride, and in her rapid career of destruction, marching from one crime against the world to another, descending deeper and deeper into the abyss of interminable, foreign and domestic bloodshed, was, from the summit of her triumphs, to sink beyond redemption, down to Caligula and Nero?--We might point out, as an instance of this ever growing and reckless arrogance, the moment when the last king of Macedon,[64] not more than a century and a half from the death of Alexander the Great, was led in triumph into the city of the conquerors, a captive and in chains, to sate the eyes of the Roman populace. It entered into the high designs of Providence in the government of the world, during this middle and second period of universal history, that each of the conquering nations should receive its full measure of justice from another worse than itself, emerging suddenly from obscurity, and chosen as the instrument of its annihilation or subjection. But a still more decisive example of the spirit of Roman conquests was the cruel destruction of Carthage in the third Punic war, begun without any assignable motive and from pure caprice. In this case no other resistance could be expected than the resistance of despair, which here indeed showed itself in all its energy. For seventeen days the city was in flames, and the numbers that were exterminated amounted to seven hundred thousand souls, including the women and children sold into slavery; so that this scene of horror