took no farther account of public business, and therefore we may conclude the conference, if it took that turn, did not come to any satisfactory conclusion on the point.

Tiberius on his accession found the empire in a critical situation, for besides the movements which Clemens on one part and Scribonius Libo on another were making, the Pannonian and German armies were in absolute revolt. This was no time for making any change in the constitution of the imperial power, had he been so disposed; as he was a man of deep measures, he held himself on the reserve with the senate, and suffered them to solicit his acceptance of the sovereign power upon their knees. He wished to have assessors in the government; he would take his share, and whatever department in the state they should recommend to his charge he would readily undertake. Had he persisted in refusing the empire, or had he attempted to throw the constitution back to its first principles of freedom, the mutinous legions would have forced the sovereignty upon Germanicus; but by this suggestion of a partition he artfully sounded the temper of the senate, where there were some leading men of very doubtful characters, whom Augustus had marked out in his last illness; from two of these, Asinius Gallus and L. Aruntius, Tiberius's proposal drew an answer, in which they demanded of him to declare what particular department of the state he would choose to have committed to him. This was opening enough for one of his penetration, and he drew his conclusions upon the spot, evading for the time the snare that was laid for him.

The servile and excessive adulation of the senate soon convinced him that the Roman spirit had suffered a total change under the reign of Augustus, and that the state might indeed be thrown into con

vulsions by any attempt at a change in favour of freedom, but that slavery and submission under a despotic master was their determined choice, and if the alternative was to lie between himself and any other, there was little room for hesitation. Who more fit than the adopted heir of Augustus, and a descendant of the Claudian house, which ranked so high in the Patrician nobility, and so superior in pretensions of ancestry and merit to the Julian and Octavian gentry, from whom his predecessors were ignobly descended?

When the German and Pannonian mutinies were appeased, there seems to have been a period of repose, when he might have new modeled the constitution, had he been so disposed; but this I take to be appearance only, for those mutinies had been quelled by Germanicus and Drusus, and both these princes were in the adoption; and the latter of a very turbulent and ambitious spirit.

In

For the space of two complete years, Tiberius never stirred out of the doors of his palace, devoting his whole time to the affairs of government. this period he certainly did many excellent things; and though his manners were not calculated for popularity, yet his reputation through the empire was universal; he regulated all domestic matters with consummate prudence, and on some occasions with a liberal and courteous spirit. In the distant provinces, where wars and disturbances were more frequent, public measures were more indebted for their success to the good policy of his instructions than to the courage and activity of his generals, though Germanicus was of the number.

The death of that most amiable and excellent prince, which was imputed to the machinations of Cneius Piso, involved Tiberius in some degree in the same suspicion; but as Tacitus, in his account

of the event, gives admission to an idle story of sorceries and incantations, practised by Piso for compassing the death of Germanicus, and states no circumstance that can give any reasonable ground for belief, that he actually poisoned him, I am not inclined to give credit to the transaction, even in respect to Piso's being guilty of the murder, much less with regard to Tiberius. Tacitus indeed hints at secret orders supposed by some to have been given by the emperor to Piso; but this, which at best is mere matter of report, does not go to the affair of the poisoning, but only to some private intimations, in which the empress was chief mover, for mortifying the pride of Agrippina. It is not to be supposed, when Piso openly returned to Rome, and stood a public trial, that these orders, had any such existed, could have been so totally suppressed that neither the guilty person should avail himself of them, nor any one member of so great and numerous a family produce them in vindication of him when yet living, or of his memory after death; and this in no period of time, not even when the Claudian family were superseded in the empire, and anecdotes were industriously collected to blacken the character of Tiberius.

The death of Drusus followed that of Germanicus, and the same groundless suspicions were leveled at the emperor; but these are rejected by Tacitus with contempt, and the words he uses, which are very strong, are a proper answer to both imputations-Neque quisquam scriptor tam infensus extitit, ut Tiberio objectaret, cum omnia conquirerent, intenderentque.

It would have been most happy for the memory of Tiberius had his life been terminated at this fatal period; henceforward he seems to have been surrendered to desperation and disgust; he retired to

the Campania, and devolved the government upon his minister Sejanus; there were times in which some marks of his former spirit appeared, but they were short and transient emanations; the basest of mankind had possession of his soul, and whether he was drugged by Sejanus and his agents, or that his brain was affected by a revulsion of that scrophulous humour, which broke out with such violence in his face and body, it seems highly natural to conjecture, that he was never in his sound mind during his secession in the island of Capreæ. A number of circumstances might be adduced in support of this conjecture; it is sufficient to instance his extraordinary letter to the senate; can words be found more expressive of a distracted and desperate state of mind than the following? Quid scribam vobis, Patres Conscripti, aut quomodo scribam, aut quid omnio non scribam hoc tempore, Dii me deæque pejus perdant, quam perire quotidie sentio, si scio.

I beg leave now to repeat what I advanced in the outset of this paper, and which alone led me to the subject of it, that a detail comprising all the great and interesting events within the life of Tiberius, with reasonings and remarks judiciously interspersed as these occurrences arise in the course of the narration, would compound such a body of useful precepts and instructions as would apply to every species of example, which a prince should be taught either to imitate or avoid; and these lessons would carry the greater force and recommendation with them, and have an advantage over all fabulous morals, by being incorporated with a real history of the most interesting sort.

No. LIV.

HOWEVER disposed we may be to execrate the bloody act of the regicides, yet we must admit the errors and misconduct of Charles's unhappy reign to be such as cannot be palliated; in our pity for his fate we must not forget the history of his failings, nor, whilst we are sympathizing in the pathos of the tragedy, overlook its moral.

Four successive parliaments, improvidently dissolved, were sufficient warnings for the fifth to fall upon expedients for securing to themselves a more permanent duration, by laying some restraints upon a prerogative so wantonly exerted.

Let us call to mind the inauspicious commencement of this monarch's reign. Before the ceremony of his coronation had taken place, he espoused a sister of France, and set a catholic princess on the throne of a protestant kingdom, scarce cool from the ferment of religious jealousies, recently emancipated from the yoke of Rome, and of course intolerant through terror, if not by principle. The most obnoxious man in the kingdom was Montague, author of the proscribed tract, intitled Apello Casarem, and him Charles enrolled in his list of royal chaplains. By throwing himself incontinently into the hands of Buckingham, he showed his people they were to expect a reign of favouritism, and the choice of the minister marked the character of the monarch. He levied musters for the Palatinate of twelve thousand men, exacted contributions for coat and conduct money, declared martial law in the kingdom, and furnished his brother of France with a squadron of ships for the unpopular reduction of