that you durst not raise your finger against the stability of the state; although, indeed, you were tongue-valiant enough to say, that you must even be content with the heads which the runaways had left you? What! with all your full-blown confidence of surprising Preneste in the night, on the 1st of November, did you not find me in arms at the gate; did you not feel me in watch on the walls? Your head cannot contrive, your heart cannot conceive, a wickedness of which I shall not have notice; I measure the length and breadth of your treasons, and I sound the gloomiest depths of your soul.

Was not the night before the last sufficient to convince you, that there is a good genius protecting that republic which a ferocious demoniac is labouring to destroy? I aver that, on that same night, you and your complotters assembled in the house of Marcus Portius Læca.

Can

even your own tongue deny it? Yet secret! speak out, man; for, if you do not, there are some I see around me who shall have an agonising proof that I am true in my assertion.

Good and great gods! where are we? What city do we inhabit? Under what government do we live? Here, HERE, Conscript Fathers, mixed and mingled with us all -in the centre of this most grave and venerable assemblyare men sitting, quietly incubating a plot against my life, against all your lives; the life of every virtuous senator and citizen; while I, with the whole nest of traitors brooding beneath my eyes, am parading in the petty formalities of debate; and the very men appear scarcely vulnerable by my voice, who ought, long since, to have been cut down with the sword.

In the house of Læca, you were, on that night. Then and there did you divide Italy into military stations did you appoint commanders of those stations; did you specify those whom you were to take along with you, and those whom you were to leave behind; did you mark out the limit of the intended conflagration; did you repeat your resolution of shortly leaving Rome, only putting it off for a little, as you said, until you could have the head of the consul. Two knights-Roman

knights-promised to deliver that head to you before sunrise the next morning; but scarcely was this stygian council dissolved, when the consul was acquainted with the result of the whole. I doubled the guards of my house; and, after announcing to a circle of the first men in the state-who were with me at the time-the very minute when these assassins would come to pay me their respects, that same minute they arrived, asked for entrance, and were denied it.

Proceed, Catiline, in your honourable career. Go where your destiny and your desire are driving you. Evacuate the city for a season. The gates stand open. Begone! What a shame that the Manlian army should look out so long for their general! Take all your loving friends along with you; or, if that be a vain hope, take at least as many as you can, and cleanse the city for some short time. Let the walls of Rome be the mediators between thee and me; for, at present, you are much too near me. I will not suffer you. I will not longer undergo you.

Lucius Catiline, away! Begin, as soon as you are able, this shameful and unnatural war. Begin it, on your part, under the shade of every dreadful omen; on mine, with the sure and certain hope of safety to my country, and glory to myself: and when this you have done, then do Thou, whose altar was first founded by the founder of our state-Thou, the stablisher of this city, pour out Thy vengeance upon this man and all his adherents. Save us from his fury; our public altars, our sacred temples our houses, and household gods; our liberties our lives. Pursue, tutelar god, pursue them -these foes to the gods and goodness-these plunderers of Italy-these assassins of Rome. Erase them out of this life; and, in the next, let thy vengeance pursue them, insatiable, implacable, immortal!

VII.—CAIUS MARIUS TO THE ROMANS.

Ir is but too common, my countrymen, to observe a material difference between the behaviour of those who stand candidates for places of power and trust, before

and after their obtaining them. They solicit them in one manner and execute them in another. They set out with a great appearance of activity, humility, and moderation; and they quickly fall into slowth, pride, and avarice. It is, undoubtedly, no easy matter to discharge, to the general satisfaction, the duty of a supreme commander in troublesome times. I am, I hope, duly sensible of the importance of the office I propose to take upon me, for the service of my country. To carry on, with effect, an expensive war, and yet be frugal of the public money-to oblige those to serve, whom it may be delicate to offendto conduct, at the same time, a complicated variety of operations-to concert measures at home answerable to the state of things abroad-and to gain every valuable end, in spite of opposition from the envious, the factious, and the disaffected-to do all this, my countrymen, is more difficult than is generally thought. And, beside the disadvantages which are common to me, with all others, in eminent stations, my case is, in this respect, peculiarly hard; that, whereas a commander of patrician rank, if he is guilty of a neglect, or breach of duty, has his great connexions-the antiquity of his family-the important services of his ancestors-and the multitudes he has by power engaged in his interest-to screen him from condign punishment; my whole safety depends upon myself, which renders it the more indispensably necessary for me to take care that my conduct be clear and unexceptionable. Besides, I am well aware, my countrymen, that the eye of the public is upon me: and that, though the impartial, who prefer the real advantages of the commonwealth to all other considerations, favour my pretensions, the patricians want nothing so much as an occasion against me. It is, therefore, my fixed resolution to use my best endeavours, that you be not disappointed in me, and that their indirect designs against me may be defeated. I have, from my youth, been familiar with toils and with dangers. I was faithful to your interest, my countrymen, when I served you for no reward but that of honour. It is not my design to betray you, now that you have conferred upon me a place of profit.

You have committed to my conduct the war against Jugurtha. The patricians are offended at this. But where would be the wisdom of giving such a command to one of their honourable body—a person of illustrious birth, of ancient family, of innumerable statues, but of no experience? What service would his long line of dead ancestors, or his multitude of motionless statues, do his country in the day of battle? What could such a general do, but, in his trepidation and inexperience, have recourse to some inferior commander for direction in difficulties, to which he was not himself equal? Thus your patrician general would, in fact, have a general over him; so that the acting commander would still be a plebeian. So true is this, my countrymen, that I have myself known those who have been chosen consuls begin then to read the history of their own country, of which, till that time, they were totally ignorant; that is, they first obtained the employment, and then bethought themselves of the qualifications necessary for the proper discharge of it. I submit to your judgment, Romans, on which side the advantage lies, when a comparison is made between patrician haughtiness and plebeian experience. The very actions, which they have only read, I have partly seen, and partly myself achieved. What they know by reading I know by action. They are pleased to slight my mean birth. I despise their mean characters. Want of birth and fortune is the objection against me: want of personal wealth, against them. But are all men of the same species? What can make a difference between one man and another, but the endowments of the mind? For my part, I shall always look upon the bravest man as the noblest man. Suppose it were inquired of the fathers of such patricians as Albinus and Bestia, whether, if they had their choice, they would desire sons of their character, or of mine; what would they answer, but that they should wish the worthiest to be their sons? If the patricians have reason to despise me, let them likewise despise their ancestors, whose nobility was the fruit of their virtue. Do they envy the honours bestowed upon me? Let them envy, likewise, my

labours, my abstinence, and the dangers I have undergone for my country, by which I have acquired them. But those worthless men lead such a life of inactivity, as if they despised any honours you can bestow, while they aspire to honours as if they had deserved them by the most industrious virtue. They arrogate the rewards of activity, for their having enjoyed the pleasures of luxury. Yet none can be more lavish than they are in praise of their ancestors; and they imagine they honour themselves, by celebrating their forefathers, whereas they do the very contrary. For, as much as their ancestors were distinguished for their virtues, so much are they disgraced by their vices. The glory of ancestors casts a light, indeed, upon their posterity; but it only serves to show what the descendants are. It alike exhibits to public view their degeneracy, and their worth. I own I cannot boast of the deeds of my forefathers; but I hope I may answer the cavils of the patricians, by standing up in defence of what I have myself done. Observe now, my countrymen, the injustice of the patricians. They arrogate to themselves honours on account of the exploits done by their forefathers, while they will not allow me the due praise for performing the very same sorts of actions in my own person. He has no statues, they cry, of his family. He can trace no venerable line of ancestors. What then! Is it matter of more praise to disgrace our illustrious ancestors, than to become illustrious by our own good behaviour? What if I can show no statues of my family! I can show the standards, the armour, and the trappings, which I have myself taken from the vanquished; I can show the scars of those wounds which I have received by facing the enemies of my country. These are my statues. These are the honours I boast of; not left me by inheritance, as theirs, but earned by toil, by abstinence, by valour, amidst clouds of dust and seas of blood-scenes of action, where those effeminate patricians, who endeavour, by indirect means, to depreciate me in your esteem, have never dared to show their faces.