The old hereditary vice and fundamental error of the Roman government, and indeed of the Roman people, was that political idolatry of the state, to which the false theory of strict and absolute law was of itself calculated to lead. Although the absolute power of Augustus was still somewhat veiled under the old forms of the Republic, yet even in his reign commenced the formal deification of the person of the Prince, and, under the succeeding emperors, it exceeded all bounds, and descended to the basest forms of adulation. And if even this idolatry had been paid, not so exclusively to the person of an Augustus or a Tiberius, as to the idea of the state identified with that person; and if thus the real object of that Pagan worship had been in the latest, as in the earliest, times, Rome, the eternally prosperous, the everlastingly powerful, the world-destroying, and people-devouring, Rome, to which every thing must fall a sacrifice; still it was not the less a thorough political idolatry. And as a sensual worship of Nature eminently characterized the poetical religion of the Greeks--as the abusive rites of magic were peculiar to the false mysteries of Egypt--so this third and greatest aberration of Paganism,--political idolatry in its most frightful shape, formed the distinguishing character and leading principle of the Roman state, from the earliest to the latest period of its history. Under Augustus the Roman empire was well nigh rounded off in extent, since the geographical situation, as we before observed, of all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean might be considered a sufficiently wide natural frontier. The counties on the coast of Africa were protected by the contiguous deserts; on the Northern side of the empire, which was more menaced by invasion, the strongly fortified borders of the Rhine and the Danube formed a secure barrier. Towards the eastern and Asiatic frontier, the Parthians were indeed a powerful and formidable enemy, but there was no probability they would ever seek, as the Persians had once done, to penetrate so far beyond their boundaries; while, on the other hand, the Romans had no real interest in extending their conquests further into that region, or into the interior parts of central Asia, as such a policy would only lead them further from the centre of their empire and their power, now unalterably fixed in Italy and the old, eternal city. The thoughts and feelings of all the better Romans were no longer turned on the aggrandizement of their empire, but solely and exclusively on a great internal regeneration of public morals, and as far as was practicable, of the state itself, according to those ideal conceptions which they formed of old Rome in her better and more prosperous days. These projects of social regeneration were nearly in the same spirit and of the same tendency as those which the better emperors of succeeding ages, a Trajan and a Marcus Aurelius actually attempted to accomplish.