The civil wars that next followed had in all essential points the same character with the first, though the fearful recollection, which still dwelt in men's minds, of the times of Marius and Sylla, tended to introduce at first a certain caution in all external proceedings; but in the course of their progress, these wars resumed the sanguinary character of the earlier civil contests. The proper circle of the Roman conquests, whose natural circumference was now marked out by all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, was, in the second period of the civil wars, pretty well filled up by Cæsar and Pompey--by Pompey on the side of Asia, and by Cæsar on the side of the incomparably more formidable and more warlike nations of the North-western frontier. The conquest of Gaul was achieved by an uncommon effusion of human blood, even according to a Roman estimation; and in the fifty battles related by Cæsar to have been fought in the Gallic war, in the complete subjugation of Spain, in the first wars on the Germanic frontiers and in Britain, as well as in the North of Africa against Juba, and against the son of Mithridates, the number of men left on the field is computed at twelve hundred thousand; and it is to be observed that as Cæsar is his own historian, these estimates have in part been given by himself. Yet was he praised for his goodness and the mildness of his character; but this praise must be measured by the Roman standard, and it is so far true that Cæsar was by no means vindictive, nor in general subject to passion, nor cruel without a motive. But, whenever his interest required it, he was careless what blood he spilled. The war between Cæsar and Pompey extended over all the provinces and regions of the Roman world; but, when conqueror, Cæsar formed and followed up the plan of completing and consolidating his victory by a system of lenity and conciliation. With all his indefatigable activity and consummate wisdom, with all the equanimity, prudence and energy of his character, he appears to have been still weak enough to imagine that the laurels he had acquired, in a way unequalled by any, were insufficient without the diadem--at least he gave occasion for such a suspicion. And so the second Brutus perpetrated on his person the act, for which the elder had been so highly commended by all Roman historians. To relate the subsequent civil war of Brutus and Cassius, the reconciliation between Antony and Octavius, which involved the death of Cicero, the new rupture and war between the latter rivals, would serve only to swell this account of Rome and her destinies. These contests terminated in the establishment of monarchy, when the bloody proscriptions and civil wars of preceding times were forgotten, and Octavius, under the name of Augustus, appeared as the restorer of general peace, and the first absolute monarch of the Roman world;--a monarch whose long reign was on the whole very happy, when