compared with previous times, and who during his life was half-deified by his subjects. Unlimited power was still clothed and half veiled in the old republican forms and expressions; and the recollection of Cæsar's fate was too present to the mind of the cautious Augustus, for him ever to neglect those forms and usages. It would really appear as if the world were destined to breathe for a time in peace, and to repose awhile from those earlier wars, before another and a higher peace descended, and became visible on the earth--and along with that other, higher and divine peace, a new and spiritual combat, waged not with the warlike parties of old, nor even with external and earthly power, but with the secret and internal cause of all those agitations, and all that injustice in the world. A golden age of literature and poetry served now to adorn the general peace, which the mighty Augustus had conferred on the conquered world. This poetry was however but a late harvest which flourished towards the autumn of declining Paganism. Plautus and Terence we can regard merely as tolerably successful imitators of the Greeks. The beautiful diction and poetry of Virgil and Horace are in a general survey of literature chiefly valuable, inasmuch as they gave a noble refinement to a language which, in modern ages, and even still among ourselves, has been universally current; but all this poetry, including that, which the richer, more copious, and more inventive fancy of Ovid produced, can be considered by posterity as only a very thin gleaning after the full bloom and rich harvest of Grecian poetry and art. The real poetry of the Roman people lay elsewhere than in those artificial compositions of Greek scholars. It must be sought for in the festive games of the circus, which the prudent Augustus never neglected--in those theatrical combats, where the Gladiator, wrestling with death, knew how to fall and die with dignity, when he wished to obtain the plaudits of the multitude--in that circus, in fine, which so often afterwards resounded with the cry of an infuriated populace;--"Christianos ad leones," "the Christians to the lions, the Christians to the lions."