If we wish to revive the ideas which were associated by the Romans with their princely houses, we must think rather of such Roman palaces as are described by Mr. Marion Crawford in his Italian Romances; we must add to this conception something of a mediæval court, something too of the great mercantile house of the Renascence. So far as the family was concerned which inhabited such a house as Pompeius built for himself in the Carinæ, it was often composed of many generations, and of persons connected by various degrees of affinity; it was a patriarchal establishment, at whose head stood the eldest man of full age descended in the line of primogeniture from the founder--it was not merely the home of a man and his wife and their children. Nor again was the house only a place of residence: it was a place of business, and the business was of many kinds--some of it was political, some financial, some legal, some industrial. In private as in public life at Rome there was not that strict differentiation of functions, and fine division of labour and responsibility, which comparatively recent experiences have caused our contemporaries to regard as a law of existence. The Roman Empire was not built upon the foundations afforded by the assembly of the Tribes, or the assembly of the Centuries, or even by the Senate itself, but upon the surpassing ability of the great families and the suitability of their organization for the work which fell into their hands. Collectively as the Senate they exhibited similar ability during a period which was long enough to fix the reputation of Rome, but this period was both preceded and followed by times in which the work of individual houses was supremely effective. The Imperial household differed in nothing but the greater extent of its responsibilities from other households. Augustus was not the only Roman noble who lived upon the Palatine Hill, and his establishment was ostentatiously modest; many of his contemporaries lived in finer palaces, and exhibited greater magnificence in private, but the moderation of Augustus was only relative, and his house was able to find room at different times for two successive commanders-in-chief, Agrippa and Tiberius, with their families and dependents. If Roman history was presented to young Romans in a form which drew their attention largely to such purely constitutional questions as the quarrels between the Patricians and Plebeians, it did not omit the legends of the great houses. The Senatorial dynasty had its heroic mythology; Horatius who kept the bridge, Cincinnatus who left his plough to command the army, the Fabians who all died in one day for their country, Curtius who leapt into the gulf, occupied in the imagination of Roman boys much the same place as King Alfred and his cakes occupy in the mind of the English boy. Every funeral of a member of one of the great families paraded before the eyes of Rome the effigies of men associated with stirring events in the history of