pretexts--whether it were the maintenance of the law, and of the ancient constitution, as asserted by the Patricians--or the just claims of the people, and the necessary changes which the altered circumstances of the times demanded, as alleged by the opposite party. It was now an open struggle for ascendancy between a few factious leaders and their partisans--a civil war carried on between fierce and formidable Oligarchs. The effusion of blood was still greater in the troubles which the younger Caius Gracchus occasioned, and which had the same motive and the same object as the preceding commotions, though conducted with more animosity, and stained by greater crimes; and in the Patrician party, the noble Scipio, the hero of the third Punic war, fell a victim of assassination. Murders and poisoning were now every day more common; and it became the practice to carry daggers under the mantle. On this occasion we may cite an observation, made not by any father of the church, or any Christian moralist; but by a celebrated German historian, who was in other respects an enthusiastic admirer of the Republican heroism of the ancients: "Rome, the mistress of the world," says he, "drunk with the blood of nations, began now to rage in her entrails." Of Marius and Sylla, on whom next devolved the conduct of the Patrician and Plebeian parties in the civil war, now conducted on a more extended scale, it is difficult to decide which of the two surpassed the other in cruelty and blood-thirstiness. Marius was indeed of a ruder, and more savage character--but Sylla evinced perhaps a more systematic and relentless ferocity. Both were great generals; and it was only after obtaining splendid victories over foreign nations that they could think of turning their fury against their native city, after having spent their rage on the rest of mankind. The victories of Marius had delivered Rome from the mighty danger with which she had been menaced, by the irruption of the powerful tribes of the Cimbri and Teutones--the first fore-runner of the Great Northern migration. Danger served but to arouse the Roman people to more triumphant exertions; and every effort of hostile resistance, when once overcome, tended only to confirm their universal dominion. The greatest and most formidable of these efforts of resistance was made by Mithridates, King of Pontus--it began by the murder of eighty thousand Romans in his dominions, and the simultaneous revolt of all the Italian nations against the Roman sway. No enemy of the Romans, since Hannibal, had formed such a deep-laid plan as Mithridates, whose intention it was to unite in one armed confederacy against Rome all the nations of the North, from the regions of Mount Caucasus, as far as Gaul and the Alps. By his victories over this enemy, Sylla prepared to return to Rome, torn and convulsed by civil war; and on his entry into the city, he treated it with all the infuriated