brilliant, devoid of personal fascination, awful rather than amiable, but wise enough and temperate enough and strong enough to do the work which was set before him. Why then this perpetual stream of calumny, which has filtered down practically unchecked for nearly two thousand years? The immediate causes have been demonstrated in the foregoing pages; the subsequent causes Tiberius shares with the Roman Empire, of which he was in some sense an incarnation. It has been the custom of some Christian writers since the period of the Reformation to oppose Christianity to the Roman Empire; there is no trace of any such opposition in the earliest Christian writings. Neither the Gospels nor the Acts of the Apostles, nor the letters of St. Paul, nor those ascribed to the friends and contemporaries of Jesus of Nazareth, nor even the writings of the early Fathers, show the faintest indication of dissatisfaction with the Empire as such. The evidence, in fact, is in the contrary direction. But the later expounders of Christianity required a contrast, and it was an easy feat of rhetoric to collect all that is discreditable from the mass of Roman records and to compare it disadvantageously with the pure teaching of the Gospel. Tiberius himself had in this aspect the misfortune to be the contemporary of the founder of Christianity, and in the idle tales of Suetonius and the studied malignity of Tacitus an opportunity was found for starting the contrast from the very commencement. This particular antithesis is so convenient that the wickedness of Tiberius has almost assumed the dignity of an “articulus fidei,” and to dispute it is to tread the perilous path of the heresiarch. Let us hope that the prescience of Tiberius as he watched the sun setting over the Mediterranean from the cliffs of Capreæ did not enable him to contemplate the long roll of centuries during which his name would be held in execration by the posterity of those for whom he had laboured, and on continents far beyond his ken, or to anticipate that savage howl of “Tiberius to the Tiber” with which the graceless populace of Rome greeted his funeral, or the still more cruel repetition of its echo from one generation to another. The Imperial Family. There are five chief lines of descent-- From CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR through his great-nephew and adopted son Octavianus, known after B.C. 27 as Augustus. From CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR through his great-niece Octavia, sister to Augustus. From MARCUS ANTONIUS through his children by his second wife, Octavia. From TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS NERO through his two sons by Livia, the second wife of Augustus. From MARCUS VIPSANIUS AGRIPPA through his children by Julia I, the daughter of Augustus. CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR OCTAVIANUS AUGUSTUS married I. A daughter of Marcus Antonius and Fulvia, whom he almost immediately repudiated.