venture to raise a doubt whether Verres ought really to be cousidered that exorbitant criminal whose guilt has been so profoundly impressed upon us all by the forsenic artifices of Cicero. The true reasons for his condemnation must be sought, first, in the proximity to Rome of that Sicilian province where many of his alleged oppressions had occurred-the fluent intercourse with this island, and the multiplied inter-connexions of individual towns with Roman grandees, aggravated the facilities of making charges; whilst the proofs were any thing but satisfactory in the Roman judicature. Here lay one disadvantage of Verres; but another wasthat the ordinary system of bribes, viz. the sacrifice of one portion from the spoils in the shape of bribes to the jury (judices) in order to redeem the other portions, could not be applied in this case. The spoils were chiefly works of art: Verres was the very first man who formed a gallery of art in Rome; and a French writer in the Académie des Inscriptions has written a most elaborate catalogue raisonnée to this gallery-drawn from the materi als left by Cicero and Pliny. But this was obviously a sort of treasure that did not admit of partition. And the object of Verres would equally have been defeated by selling a part for the costs of "salvage" on the rest. In this sad dilemma, Verres upon the whole resolved to take his chance: or, if bribery were applied to some extent, it must have stopped far short of that excess to which it would have proceeded under a more disposable form of his gains. But we will not conceal the truth which Cicero indirectly reveals. The capital abuse in the provincial system was not that the guilty governor might escape, but that the innocent governor might be ruined. It is evident that, in a majority of cases, this magistrate was thrown upon his own discretion. Nothing could be so indefinite and uncircumstantial as the Roman laws on this head. The most upright administrator was almost as cruelly laid open to the fury of calumnious persecution as the worst: both were often cited to answer upon parts of their adminis tration altogether blameless; but, when the original rule had been so wide and lax, the final resource must be in the mercy of the tribunals.

II. The Roman judicial system.— This would require a separate volume, and chiefly upon this ground-that in no country upon earth, except Rome, has the ordinary administration of justice been applied as a great political engine. Men, who could not otherwise be removed, were constantly assailed by impeachments; and oftentimes for acts done forty or fifty years before the time of trial. But this dreadful aggravation of the injustice was not generally needed. The system of trial was the most corrupt that has ever prevailed under European civilization. The composition of their courts, as to the rank of the numerous jury, was continually changed: but no change availed to raise them above bribery. The rules of evidence were simply none at all. Every hearsay, erroneous rumour, atrocious libel, was allowed to be offered as evidence. Much of this never could be repelled, as it had not been anticipated. And, even in those cases where no bribery was attempted, the issue was dependent, almost in a desperate extent, upon the impression made by the advocate. And finally, it must be borne in mind that there was no presiding judge, in our sense of the word, to sum up-to mitigate the effect of arts or falsehood in the advocate-to point the true bearing of the evidence-still less to state and to restrict the law. Law there very seldom was any, in a precise circumstantial shape. The verdict might be looked for accordingly. And we do not scruple to say-that so triumphant a machinery of oppression has never existed, no, not in the dungeons of the inquisition.

III. The license of public libelling. -Upon this we had proposed to enlarge. But we must forbear. One only caution we must impress upon the reader; he may fancy that Cicero would not practise or defend in others the absolute abuse of confidence on the part of the jury and audience by employing direct falsehoods. But this is a mistake. Cicero, in his justification of the artifices used at the bar, evidently goes the whole length of advising the employment of all misstatements whatsoever which wear a plausible air. His own practice leads to the same inference. Not the falsehood, but the defect of probability, is what in his eyes degrades any possible assertion or insinuation. And he

holds also-that a barrister is not accountable for the frequent selfcontradictions in which he must be thus involved at different periods of time. The immediate purpose is paramount to all extra-judicial consequences whatever, and to all subsequent exposures of the very grossest inconsistency in the most calumnious falsehoods.

So

IV. The morality of expediency employed by Roman statesmen.- The regular relief, furnished to Rome under the system of anarchy which Cæsar proposed to set aside, lay in seasonable murders. When a man grew potent in political annoyance, somebody was employed to murder him. Never was there a viler or better established murder than that of Clodius by Milo, or that of Carbo and others by Pompey when a young man, acting as the tool of Sylla. Yet these and the murders of the two Gracchi, nearly a century before, Cicero justifies as necessary. little progress had law and sound political wisdom then made, that Cicero was not aware of any thing monstrous in pleading for a most villanous act that circumstances had made it expedient. Such a man is massacred, and Cicero appeals to all your natural feelings of honour against the murderers. Such another is massacred on the opposite side, and Cicero thinks it quite sufficient to reply“Oh, but I assure you he was a bad man-I knew him to be a bad man. And it was his duty to be mur. dered as the sole service he could render the commonwealth." So again, in common with all his professional brethren, Cicero never scruples to ascribe the foulest lusts and abominable propensities to any public antagonist; never asking himself any question but this Will it look probable? He personally escaped such slanders, because as a young man he was known to be rather poor, and very studious. But in later life a horrible calumny of that class settled upon himself, and one peculiarly shocking to his paren tal grief; for he was then sorrowing in extremity for the departed lady who had been associated in the slander. Do we lend a moment's credit to the foul insinuation? No. But we see the equity of this retribution revolving upon one who had so often slandered others in the same malicious way. At

last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when it wounded the most acutely.

V. The continued repetition of convulsions in the state.-Under the last head we have noticed a consequence of the long Roman anarchy dreadful enough to contemplate, viz. the necessity of murder as a sole relief to the extremities continually recurring, and as a permanent temptation to the vitiation of all moral ideas in the necessity of defending it imposed often upon such men as Cicero. This was an evil which cannot be exaggerated: but a more extensive evil lay in the recurrence of those conspiracies which the public anarchy promoted. We have all been deluded upon this point. The conspiracy of Catiline, to those who weigh well the mystery still enveloping the names of Cæsar, of the Consul C. Antonius, and others suspected as partial accomplices in this plot, and who consider also what parties were the exposers or merciless avengers of this plot, was but a reiteration of the attempts made within the previous fifty years by Marius, Cinna, Sylla, and finally by Cæsar and by his heir Octavius, to raise a reformed government, safe and stable, upon this hideous oligarchy that annually almost brought the people of Rome into the necessity of a war and the danger of a merciless proscription. That the usual system of fraudulent falsehoods was offered by way of evidence against Catiline, is pretty obvious. Indeed, why should it have been spared? The evidence, in a lawyer's sense, is after all none at all. The pretended revelations of foreign envoys go for nothing. These could have been suborned most easily. And the shocking defect of the case isthat the accused party were never put on their defence, never confronted with the base tools of the accusers, and the senators amongst them were overwhelmed with clamours if they attempted their defence in the senate. The motive to this dreadful injustice is manifest. There was a conspiracy; that we do not doubt; and of the same nature as Cæsar's. Else why should eminent men, too dangerous for Cicero to touch, have been implicated in the obscurer charges? How had they any interest in the ruin of Rome? How had Catiline any interest in such a tragedy?-But all the

grandees, who were too much embarrassed in debt to bear the means of profiting by the machinery of bribes applied to so vast a populace, naturally wished to place the administration of public affairs on another footing; many from merely selfish purposes, like Cethegus or Lentulus-some, we doubt not, from purer motives of enlarged patriotism. One charge against Catiline we may quote from many, as having tainted the most plausible part of the pretended evidence with damnatory suspicions, The reader may not have remarked but the fact is such that one of the standing artifices for injuring a man with the populace of Rome, when all other arts had failed, was to say, that amongst his plots was one for burning the city. This cured that indifference with which otherwise the mob listened to stories of conspiracy against a system which they held in no reverence or affection. Now, this most senseless charge was renewed against Catiline. It is hardly worthy of notice. Of what value to him could be a heap of ruins? Or how could he hope to found an influence amongst those who were yet reeking from such a calamity? But, in reality, this conspiracy was that effort continually moving underground, and which would have conti

nually exploded in shocks dreadful to the quiet of the nation, which mere necessity, and the instincts of position, prompted to the parties interested. Let the reader only remember the long and really ludicrous succession of men sent out against Antony at Mutina by the senate, viz. Octavius, Plancus, Asinius Pollio, Lepidus, every one of whom fell away almost instantly to the anti-senatorial cause, to say nothing of the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, who would undoubtedly have followed the general precedent, had they not been killed prematurely and it will become apparent how irresistible this popular cause was, as the sole introduction to a patriotic reformation, rarged too notoriously against a narrow scheme of selfishness, which interested hardly forty families. It does not follow that all men, simply as enemies of an oligarchy, would have afterwards exhibited a pure patriotism. Cæsar, however, did. His reforms, even before his Pompeian struggle, were the greatest ever made by an individual; and those which he carried through after that struggle, and during that brief term which his murderers allowed him, transcended by much all that in any one century had been accomplished by the collective patriotism of Rome.

THE Royal Academy have chosen a motto from Symmachus for their catalogue this year that may be of ambiguous sense-" Omne quod in cursu est viget." There are movements in a circle, movements retrogressive as progressive. The vitality shown in the course, the movement, is not always healthy, not always indicative of vigour. A foundered posthorse cannot keep on his legs at a quiet pace-you must spur him to the full trot or the gallop. A spent ball too, viget, yet is nevertheless a spent ball, progressing to a dead stop apparently leisurely enough, yet deadly to encounter. A newly recruited soldier in one of our battles, not being in the thick of the fray, saw one of these spent cannon-balls hesitatingly and slowly rolling onwards near the ranks, and to make sport, ran out to stop it as he would a cricket-ball, but it killed him on the spot. "Omne quod in cursu est viget," was to him an epitaph. We do not see any very just application of the line to the academicians and their works. We cannot suspect them of the extreme modesty, that they should say in it," You see we keep moving, therefore are not defunct." And yet it is more than possible that they may have some spent balls" among them; and some who, like the post-horse, exhibit their vitality in rapid and eccentric motions, with which public taste cannot keep pace. "Symmachus" here then is not a good"ally," as the name would import, and is rather ready to trip up the heels of friend or foe.

For our part, we do most sincerely wish that our academicians would go on at a more sober pace, and not endeavour to outrun each other at all, oftentimes outrunning thereby all judgment, both their own and the world's. And while in the wishing trim we may add, that we should be better pleased if they did not admit so many candidates in the race, though many of them do happen to come with flaunty colours and ribbons flying. One thousand. four hundred and nine works of art in one exhibition is a fearful number, perhaps enough to bring the arts into disrepute. And then we are told of hundreds upon hundreds rejected; and yet a general cry is raised for patronage. That is well enough, for it must require a great deal of patron

age to take off this stock on hand; but then with this cry for patronage, there is a concurrent attempt to raise, not art, but artists by the thousands so that if we "progress," and our English school "of design viget, an income tax will not provide all with a crust and porter. It may be very much doubted if the multiplication of artists is the advancement of art. It encourages a taste for mediocrity, even intentional mediocrity; it sets before the public eye too conspicuously minor fascinations, till it is content to look no higher, and to leave the mind unfed. We wish, therefore, it were a rule to select the best pictures, best in their moral effect and dignity, to an amount not exceeding one hundred; and surely it would be very difficult to find, at any one exhibition, such a number, worthy to bear and carry with them in the world's opinion the stamp of the "English school." It is not intended by these remarks that pictures of lower class should not be exhibited; they should have their appropriate "show rooms; ,, but we would have our Royal Academy come forth with the sanction of genius, and "honoris causâ" the implied mark of distinction for every production it exhibits. We might then have an "English school." If the academy, however, will still go on upon the multiplying scale, we should like to see a new establishment arise upon this limiting foundation, persuaded that it would create ten times the interest of any other exhibition, and hold forth a noble object of emulation. We want to make not many painters, but great painters; noble rewards, not frittered and minute distributions. We should not care if half the artists we already have, and who have merit and dexterity of execution, were sent taylored to-morrow. We are overwhelmed with mediocrity of talent—with works you cannot deny to be good in their kind, but of a bad kind, without meaning, or any meaning that the mind will burden itself to remember. We paint all things, where few are worthy. Our great academical exhibition wants a character. It has nothing great and important wherewith to designate it. We happened, before we had visited the Exhibition, to ask a foreigner of great acknow ledged taste and distinction, what he