concerned to know, we learn the least. The Roman state of this epoch resembles a mighty tree, the main stem of which, in the course of its decay, is surrounded by vigorous offshoots pushing their way upwards. The Roman senate and the Roman rulers soon came to be drawn from any other region of the empire just as much as from Italy; the Quirites of this epoch, who have become the nominal heirs of the world-subduing legionaries, have nearly the same relation to the memories of the olden time as our Knights of St. John have to Rhodes and Malta; and they look upon their heritage as a right capable of being turned to profitable account--as an endowment provided for the benefit of the poor that shrink from work. Any one who has recourse to the so-called authorities for the history of this period--even the better among them--finds difficulty in controlling his indignation at the telling of what deserved to be suppressed, and at the suppression of what there was need to tell. For this epoch was also one productive of great conceptions and far-reaching action. Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in an orderly sequence; and the firm rules of administration, which Caesar and Augustus traced out for their successors, maintained their ground, on the whole, with remarkable steadfastness notwithstanding all those changes of dynasties and of dynasts, which assume more than due prominence in a tradition that looks merely to such things, and dwindles erelong into mere biographies of the emperors. The sharply-defined sections, which--under the current conception, misled by the superficial character of such a basis--are constituted by the change of rulers, pertain far more to the doings of the court than to the history of the empire. The carrying out of the Latin-Greek civilising process in the form of perfecting the constitution of the urban community, and the gradual bringing of the barbarian or at any rate alien elements into this circle, were tasks, which, from their very nature, required centuries of steady activity and calm self-development; and it constitutes the very grandeur of these centuries that the work once planned and initiated found this long period of time, and this prevalence of peace by land and sea, to facilitate its progress. Old age has not the power to develop new thoughts and display creative activity, nor has the government of the Roman empire done so; but in its sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there