The Roman bore little noblenesss of soul in life, and found corresponding gloom at its end. Brutus, whose patriotism was darkened by despair, and who died a suicide, exclaimed, "O, virtue! thou art but a name." In reviewing the moral condition of the ancients, we find something to admire, but much to condemn. All things that illustrate their religious views and customs, go not only to exemplify the apostolic declaration, "the world by wisdom knew not God," but equally attest the same writer's description of the vices common to the heathen world. Frivolity and mirth generally prevailed, but true happiness was unknown. A tone of sadness dwelt deepest in the popular heart, as appears not only in the choral odes of tragedy, but even in their comic writings; a sadness inseparable from the condition of gifted minds, conscious of present evils, ignorant of future bliss, and having no other resource than that insane philosophy, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Gleams of divine Providence lay amid the gloomy abodes of polytheism; the great truth of future retribution was suggested in the poetic follies of Tartarus and Elysium. A few torn wreaths from the wreck of Paradise seem to have floated to the Italian shores, elegant to suggest, but impotent to save. Many of the classic legends indicate a remote and universal consciousness of the natural and perpetual course of all civilizing powers. When Ulysses set sail from the isle of Circe, with tears he launched his dark vessel upon the sea, and, after sailing all day with a favorable wind, he arrived at sunset at the boundaries of the "deep flowing Oceanus," and the city of the Cimmerians, whose darkness is never dispelled. He there evokes the dead; then sails from outer ocean back into the sea, and when he returns to the Circean isle, whose site had been so clearly fixed in the West, he finds the gates of morning and of Aurora. In Læstrygonia, beyond the western horizon, were placed the herds of the sun, and the gardens of the Hesperides adjoined Eurythia, ruddy with the setting ray. There lived the aged Cronus, the three-bodied giant of the West, guarding his oxen, or the years sunk beneath the wave. But Hercules, in the character of Greek devotion, warring against Phœnician superstition, slays the dog Orthos, and the gloomy herdsman Eurythion, and brings back the lost kine to Argos. Under the guidance of Minerva, or divine wisdom presiding over nature, he is enabled to wield his arms of light against the prince of darkness; but these labors have ever to be repeated, that the apples and the dog may be carefully restored by Minerva to their original and rightful places. These mythological fables are interesting, so far as they indicate the glimmerings of great events, but they also remind us of dark and desperate national characteristics. The Romans, especially, like the favorite deity, Bacchus, were terrible in war, but voluptuous and cruel in peace.