The historians do not allow Tiberius even to die in peace. We are told that when he became aware that his health was failing, he was nervously anxious to conceal the fact; he left Capreæ and took up his quarters in the villa of Lucullus on the mainland opposite the island. Having discovered that his physician had surreptitiously felt his pulse, he ordered a better dinner than usual, and ostentatiously enjoyed himself, but the effort was too much for him; he fainted, and a report was immediately spread through the household that he was dead. Caligula was receiving the congratulations of all, and was proceeding to act as Emperor, when there was a rumour that the old man had recovered. At the suggestion of Macro, orders were at once given to smother him beneath a pile of mattresses. The story is finely sensational, but it is to be hoped that it is not true. Whatever was the exact nature of his end, Tiberius died in the seventy-eighth year of his life, and the twenty-third of his reign, having lived through such vicissitudes of fortune, and such a continuity of hard work, as have rarely fallen to the lot of any human being; but far stranger than the events of his life is the horrible reputation that has attached to the memory of the man who held that in all things princes were bound to consider their good name. Even if we accept the sensational stories which have accumulated round the retirement at Capreæ, we have still to recognize a life of sixty-eight years unstained by vice or crime, and chiefly spent in the laborious execution of the highest public duties. As a general, as a statesman, Tiberius stands, if not in the first rank, then at the very top of the second, and he deserves this additional credit, that public life was distasteful to him, power had no attraction for him, and had he been at liberty to choose for himself he would have lived in seclusion, a student of literature and natural science. We see in him, in fact, the best type of Roman, the best example of that peculiar character by which Rome rose to be mistress of the world. It was not the cleverness of the Romans, nor their military skill, that gave them the mastery, the Greeks were far cleverer, and Hannibal was greater than any Roman general, it was their strong sense of public duty, their passion for legality, their love of order, their tenacity in prosecuting large schemes, their self-restraint, their honour, which enabled them to succeed where Greek and Phœnician had failed before them, and where Gaul and Teuton were to fail after them. All these qualities are strongly represented in Tiberius; he is the ideal Roman Senator, the realization of those legendary types which formed the imagination of Roman children. It is not Cicero, the fluent orator, the versatile man of letters and agreeable gentleman, who represents the true Roman, nor Cato the bigot, nor Cæsar the man of genius: it is the dogged, dutiful, and just Tiberius, not over enthusiastic, not