Chapter II: Part 2

“To obtain each of these high offices (as those of Quæstor, Ædile,
Prætor, Consul, Censor), the Roman was obliged to seek the suffrages
of his fellow-citizens. They were all open to the ambition of every
one whose name had been entered by the Censors in the Register of
Citizens, provided he had reached the required age. No office, except
the Censorship, was held for a longer period than twelve months. No
officer received any pay or salary for his services. To defray
expenses, certain allowances were made from the treasury by order of
the Senate. To discharge routine duties and to conduct their
correspondence, each magistrate had a certain number of clerks
(Scribæ), who formed what we should call the civil service, and who
had before this assumed an important position in the State.

“But though the highest offices seemed thus absolutely open to every
candidate, they were not so in practice. About the time of the first
Punic war an alteration was made, which in effect confined the Curule
officers to the wealthy families. The Ædiles were charged with the
management of the public games, and for celebrating them with due
splendour a liberal allowance had been made from the treasury. At the
time just mentioned, this allowance was withdrawn. Yet the Curule
Ædiles were still expected to maintain the honour of Rome by costly
spectacles at the Great Roman Games, the Megalesian Festival, and
others of less consequence. A great change was wrought by this law,
which, under a popular aspect, limited the choice of the people to
those who could buy their favour. None could become Ædile who had not
the command of money, or at least of credit.

“That which strikes the mind as most remarkable in the executive
government of Rome, is the short period for which each magistrate held
his office, and the seeming danger of leaving appointments so
important to the suffrages of the people at large; and this is still
more striking when we remember that the same system was extended to
the army itself, as well as to its generals. The Romans had no
standing army. Every Roman citizen between the complete ages of
seventeen and forty-five, and possessing property worth at least 4000
lb. of copper, was placed on the military roll. From this roll four
legions, two for each Consul, were enlisted every year; and in cases
of necessity additional legions were raised. But at the close of the
year’s campaign these legionary soldiers had a right to return home
and be relieved by others. Nor were there any fixed officers. Each
legion had six tribunes and sixty centurions; but these were
appointed, like the consuls and soldiers, fresh every year. The
majority of the tribunes were now elected by the people at the Comitia
of the tribes, and the remainder were nominated by the consuls of the
year; the only limitation to such choice being, that those elected or
nominated should have served in the legions at least five campaigns.
The Centurions were then nominated by the Tribunes, subject to the
approval of the Consuls. No doubt the Tribunes or Consuls, for their
own sake, would nominate effective men; and therefore we should
conclude, what we find to be the fact, that the Roman armies depended
much on their Centurions, and on those Tribunes who were nominated by
the Consuls.”

Everything hitherto seems to be in a state of perpetual change and disorganisation. If a consul were pursuing his operations ever so successfully, he was liable to be superseded at the close of the year by his successor in the consulship; and this successor brought with him new soldiers and new officers. This inconvenience was so great that the constitutional usages were necessarily broken through: the same men were re-elected to the consulship notwithstanding the law that no one should hold the office a second time except after the lapse of a certain interval. Impolitic laws, and these frequently suspended, present us with a poor guarantee for the permanence of the republic.

“But though the chief officers, both in state and army, were
continually changing at the popular will, there was a mighty power
behind them, on which they were all dependent, which did not change.
This was the SENATE.

“The importance of this body can hardly be overstated. All the acts of
the Roman Republic ran in the name of the Senate and People, as if the
Senate were half the State, though its number seems still to have been
limited to three hundred members.

“The Senate of Rome was perhaps the most remarkable assembly that the
world has ever seen. Its members held their seats for life. Once
senators, always senators, unless they were degraded for some
dishonourable cause. But the Senatorical peerage was not hereditary;
no father could transmit the honour to his son. Each man must win it
for himself.

“The manner in which seats in the Senate were obtained is tolerably
well ascertained. Many persons will be surprised to learn that the
members of this august body, all, or nearly all, owed their places to
the votes of the people. In theory, indeed, the Censors still
possessed the power really exercised by the kings and early Consuls,
of choosing the Senators at their own will and pleasure. But official
powers, however arbitrary, are always limited in practice—and the
Censors followed rules established by ancient precedent. A notable
example of the rule by which the list of the Senate was made occurs at
a period when, if ever, there was wide room for the exercise of
discretion. After the fatal days of Trasimene and Cannæ, it was found
that, to complete the just number of Senators, no less than one
hundred and seventy were wanting. Two years were yet to pass before
new Censors would be in office; and to provide an extraordinary remedy
for an extraordinary case, M. Fabius Buteo, an old Senator of high
character, was named Dictator, for the sole purpose of recruiting the
vacant ranks of his order. He thus discharged his duty: after reciting
the names of all surviving Senators, he chose as new members, first,
those who had held Curule offices since the last censorship, according
to the order of their election; then those who had served as Ædiles,
Tribunes, or Quæstors; then of those who had not held office, such as
had decorated their houses with spoils taken from the enemy, or with
crowns bestowed for saving the lives of fellow-citizens!

“The first qualification for a seat in the Senate then was that of
office. It is probable that to the qualification of office there was
added a second, property; a third limitation, that of age, followed
from the rule that the Senate was recruited from the lists of official
persons. No one could be a Senator till he was about thirty years of
age.

“The power of the Senate was equal to its dignity. It absorbed into
its ranks a large proportion of the practical ability of the
community. It was a standing council, where all official functions
were annual. And thus, it is but natural that it should engross the
chief business of the State.”

This body of ex-consuls, ex-prætors, and the like (we need hardly say that the distinction between Patrician and Plebeian had been early erased) might well justify the figure of speech which the minister of Pyrrhus used when he called the Roman Senate an assembly of kings. “Many of its members had exercised sovereign power; many were preparing to exercise it.”

The Senate had the absolute control of foreign affairs, except that, in declaring war and concluding treaties of peace, the people were consulted. The conduct of the war, and all diplomatic negotiations, were in their hands. The Consul was the servant of the Senate; the sacred pontiffs took their orders from the Senate. And, what was of no less importance, “all the financial arrangements of the State were left to their discretion.” In times of difficulty, as is well known, they had the power of suspending all rules of law by the appointment of a dictator.

“They prolonged the command of a general or suspended him at pleasure.
They estimated the sums necessary for the military chest; nor could a
sesterce be paid to the general without their order. If a Consul
proved refractory, they could transfer his power for a time to a
dictator. All disputes in Italy or beyond seas were referred to their
sovereign arbitrement.... They might also resolve themselves into a
High Court of Justice for the trial of extraordinary offences.”

Nor was this great Executive Council without participation in, or control over, the function of the legislative assemblies; for, as a general rule, no law could be proposed which had not already received the sanction of the Senate. This body may be well described as having been for many years “the main-spring of the Roman constitution.”

Next to the wars with Hannibal follow those with Philip, and Antiochus, and Perseus, all of which Dr Liddell relates with singular perspicuity. It is sad to notice how soon after the report of victories and extended empire is heard the complaint of corrupted manners, of a Senate greedy of gold, of a people following the war for plunder, making of arms a trade and profession. It was at the end of the second Punic war that we were called upon to take a survey of republican institutions, and republican simplicity of manners—of a people rude and warlike indeed, but agricultural, domestic, where divorce was unknown, faithful and pious,—and the third and last Punic war does not break out before we hear of the city being startled and alarmed at the report of wives poisoning their husbands, and at the discovery of secret associations of men and women where some new and licentious worship of Bacchus was introduced. The disease first manifests itself in the rude efforts to check it, and one of the earliest symptoms of corruption is the appearance on the stage of Cato the Censor.

Of Cato the Censor Dr Liddell gives us the outlines of a very vigorous portrait. “More familiar to us,” he says, “than almost any of the great men of Rome, we see him, with his keen grey eyes and red hair, his harsh features and spare athletic frame, strong by natural constitution and hardened by exercise, clad even at Rome in the coarsest rustic garb, attacking with plain but nervous eloquence the luxury and corruption of the nobles.” This type of a whole class of men, more honest than enlightened, stands out to us in still more distinct relief from his opposition to his great contemporary Scipio, the proud and the reflective, whom he chose to fasten upon as his antagonist. Cato had rushed to the conclusion that the wickedness of Rome was traceable to the arts and philosophy of Greece. He ought to have directed his scrutiny to the cupidity and ambition of Rome. It was wealth and power, not art and philosophy, that were corrupting his fellow-citizens. He should have done his utmost to check their spirit of pillage and of conquest. Instead of which, he joins in the war-cry of the people, and directs his hostility against Scipio, the introducer of Greek literature. Another motive also is assigned for this hostility, which is of a still more commonplace character: there were political parties in Rome as elsewhere, and Cato had attached himself to the party of Fabius, which was opposed to the Scipios.

Born at the provincial town of Tusculum, and inheriting some patrimony, lands and slaves, in the Sabine territory, near the spot once occupied by the great Curius Dentatus, the future Censor of Rome had early adopted a quite rustic mode of life. The young Cato, we are told, looked with reverence on the hearth at which Curius had been roasting his radishes when he rejected the Samnite gold, and resolved to make a model of that rude and simple patriot. He used to work with his slaves, wearing the same coarse dress, and partaking of the same fare. But conscious, nevertheless, of superior powers, and fond, we may be sure, of seeing justice done amongst his neighbours, he would resort occasionally to the nearer courts of law, to plead the cause of some client. His shrewd sayings and caustic eloquence attracted the attention especially of one Valerius Flaccus, “a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, himself a determined friend of the ancient Roman manners.” Flaccus persuaded him to leave his farm, and enter public life at Rome. There he rose, step by step, through the several offices of state, till he reached the highest honour, that of the Censorship.

“Cato was now in full possession of the immense arbitrary powers
wielded by the Censor, and determined not to act, as most Censors had
acted, merely as the minister of the Senate, but to put down luxury
with a strong hand. He had thundered against the repeal of the Oppian
law,[2] during his consulship, but in vain,—the ladies were too strong
for him. But now it was his turn. Hitherto no property had been
included in the Censor’s register, except land and houses. Cato
ordered all valuable slaves to be rated at three times the amount of
other property, and laid a heavy tax on the dress and equipages of the
women, if they exceeded a certain sum. He struck seven Senators off
the list, some for paltry causes. Manilius was degraded for kissing
his wife in public; another for an unseasonable jest; but all honest
men must have applauded when L. Flaminius was at length punished for
his atrocious barbarity.[3] It savoured of personal bitterness when,
at the grand review of the knights, he deprived L. Scipio Asiaticus of
his horse.

“In the management of public works Cato showed judgment equal to his
vigour. He provided for the repair of the aqueducts and reservoirs,
and took great pains to amend the drainage of the city. He encouraged
a fair and open competition for the contracts of tax-collection, and
so much offended the powerful companies of Publicani, that, after he
had laid down his office, he was prosecuted, and compelled to pay a
fine of 12,000 ases.”

That fine of 12,000 ases we are disposed to reckon amongst his highest titles to honour. Restricted in his notions, the Censor still claims our esteem for the genuine sturdy independence which accompanies him throughout his life, and in the presence alike of the Senate and the people. He is no craven demagogue. “You are like a parcel of sheep,” he tells the people on one occasion, “which follow their leader, they care not whither.” He interferes to prevent a gratuitous distribution of corn, which he foresaw would encourage the growth of a lazy mob in the metropolis; and on this occasion he begins his oration thus, “It is a hard thing, Romans, to speak to the belly, for it has no ears.” He was a hard-headed, self-sufficient man, not too humane, since he could recommend, in his book on agriculture, the selling off of old slaves as a useless lumber, and by no means disposed to act with clemency or justice towards foreign nations. In his old age, when he numbered eighty-four years, he led the party which clamoured for the destruction of Carthage. The old Sabine farmer appeared in the Senate, and unfolding his gown, produced some giant figs, which he held up and said, “These figs grow but three days’ sail from Rome.” He then repeated the oft-reiterated and fatal sentence, “Carthage must be destroyed!—_delenda est Carthago!_”

The morality between nation and nation always has been, and still is, execrable. Indeed, there can be no international morality until men have learned that the interest of one people is bound up with the interest of others; till, just as individuals learn that their welfare is inseparable from the welfare of some community of individuals, so nations shall learn that their own wellbeing and prosperity is inseparable from the wellbeing of some community of nations. The early policy of Rome in the treatment of the Italian cities which were compelled to acknowledge her supremacy, has often been praised; it could not have been very censurable, since at the period of Hannibal’s greatest success there were so few defections. Probably the value of some large Italian confederacy had begun to be generally appreciated; and as there was little to pillage from each other, there was the less room for injustice. When the government extended beyond Italy, over rich and conquered provinces, the historian has no longer any commendation to bestow.

“It was a general rule that all Italian land was tax-free, and that
all provincial land, except such as was specified in treaties or
decrees of the Senate, was subject to tax. This rule was so absolute
that the exemption of land from taxation was known by the technical
name of _Jus Italicum_, or the Right of Italy.

“This last distinction implies that the imperial revenues were raised
chiefly from the provinces. In the course of little more than thirty
years from the close of the Hannibalic war, this was the case, not
chiefly, but absolutely. The world was taxed for the benefit of Rome
and her citizens....

“It was as if England were to defray the expenses of her own
administration from the proceeds of a tax levied on her Indian empire.
The evil was aggravated by the way in which the taxes were collected.
This was done by contract. From time to time the taxes of each
province were put up to public auction by the Prætor or Proconsul; and
the company of contractors which outbade the rest received the
contract and farmed the taxes of the province. The members of these
companies were called _Publicani_. It is manifest that this system
offered a premium on extortion.

“The Proconsuls and Prætors exercised an authority virtually despotic.
They were Senators, and responsible to the Senate alone. It may too
surely be anticipated what degree of severity a corporation like the
Senate would exercise towards its own members in times when
communication with the provinces was uncertain and difficult, when no
one cared for the fate of foreigners, when there was no press to give
tongue to public opinion, and indeed no force of public opinion at
all. Very soon the Senatorial Proconsuls found it their interest to
support the tax-gatherers in their extortions, on condition of sharing
in the plunder. The provincial government of the republic became in
practice an organised system of oppression, calculated to enrich
fortunate Senators, and to provide them with the means of buying the
suffrages of the people, or of discharging the debts incurred in
buying them. The name of Proconsul became identified with tyranny and
greed.”

We would gladly accompany Dr Liddell farther down the stream of history, but the stream widens as we proceed. The events increase in magnitude, and the territory over which they extend expands before us; we have not “ample room or verge enough” for such themes as the names of Sylla, Pompey, Cæsar, suggest.

One subject we cannot help glancing at. The battles and conquests of Rome led to the making of innumerable slaves; and nowhere is more plainly illustrated the great truth, that injustice works evil—that wrong, or the recklessness of other men’s wellbeing, will bring with it a penalty of some kind, on some head,—for her slave-system was the curse of Rome, and the chief cause of her ruin and downfall.

Unfortunately for any distinctness of view on this subject, the same name slavery is applied to very different institutions, to very different relations between man and man, to very different rights and conduct of him who calls himself master or owner. All systems of slave-labour are no more alike than all systems of monarchy. In some cases the institution we call slavery is the only possible system that could have been adopted. But amongst the Romans slavery exhibited itself in its harshest features; here, it in part superseded and thrust aside the labour of the free peasant: in Italy it drove the native agriculturist from the soil, and converted cornfields which had been cultivated by hardy yeomen, into wild pastures, where the cattle were watched by slaves. In the city, it retarded or prevented the growth of a free industrious middle class; even what we call liberal professions suffered a certain social degradation from being thrown into the hands of slaves or freedmen. The Romans were always a harsh people, and a system which put unlimited power of life and limb into their hands, and supplied the circus with gladiatorial combats, was not likely to improve their humanity.

They were always a harsh and severe people; it is suspected that some unrecorded conquest and subjugation was the origin of the distinction between patrician and client, and that the history of the city ought really to commence with the invasion and domination of a conquering _caste_ or race. Be that as it may, one of the first laws we hear of is of so severe and cruel a character—a law of debtor and creditor of so atrocious a description—that it is almost as incredible as any of the wildest legends of that early time. We can scarcely believe that a people who had advanced to the making any laws at all, could have made one in which it was provided that “the creditor might arrest the person of his debtor, load him with chains, and feed him on bread and water for thirty days, and then, if the money still remained unpaid, he might put him to death, or sell him as a slave to the highest bidder; or, if there were several creditors, they might hew his body in pieces and divide it”—with a saving clause that, “if a man cut more or less than his due, he should incur no penalty.”—Vol. i. p. 100. Possibly this last provision was a mere threat, and to be sold as a beast of burden was the heaviest penalty that a patrician creditor ever inflicted on his debtor. It is plain, however, that when a multitude of slaves fell into the hands of the Romans, they fell into the hands of men who were not disposed to use their power leniently. They were men of blunt sensibilities. One who visited a Roman senator in the time of the Scipios might have had his ears assailed by the sharp cry of pain from a beaten slave, and certainly the first object that would have greeted his vision would have been a slave chained like a dog to the door—the “hall-porter” of those days. In subsequent times the more refined Roman could not have endured such sounds and sights in his own presence or neighbourhood; but what went on in the “ergastula” upon his estate, he probably never cared to inquire.

Our readers will perhaps prefer here a brief extract from Dr Liddell to any general statements of our own. He says:—

“A few examples will show the prodigious number of slaves that must
have been thrown into the market in the career of conquest on which
the republic entered after the Hannibalic war. To punish the Bruttians
for the fidelity with which they adhered to the cause of the great
Carthaginian, the whole nation were made slaves; no less than 150,000
Epirotes were sold by Æmilius Paulus; 50,000 were sent home by Scipio
from Carthage. These numbers are accidentally preserved; and if,
according to this scale, we calculate the hosts of unhappy men sold in
slavery during the Syrian, Macedonian, Illyrian, Grecian, and Spanish
wars, we shall be prepared to hear that slaves fit only for unskilled
labour were plentiful and cheap.

“It is evident that hosts of slaves lately free men, and many of them
soldiers, must become dangerous to the owners. Nor was their treatment
such as to conciliate. They were turned out upon the hills, made
responsible for the safety of the cattle put under their charge, and
compelled to provide themselves with the common necessaries of life. A
body of these wretched men asked their master for clothing: ‘What!’ he
asked, ‘are there no travellers with clothes on?’ The atrocious hint
was soon taken: the shepherd-slaves of lower Italy became banditti,
and to travel through Apulia without an armed retinue was a perilous
adventure. From assailing travellers the marauders began to plunder
the smaller country-houses; and all but the rich were obliged to
desert the country, and flock into the towns. When they were not
employed upon the hills, they were shut up in large prison-like
buildings (_ergastula_), where they talked over their wrongs, and
formed schemes of vengeance.”

No wonder we hear of Sicilian slave-wars. Nor can we wonder, after this, at the statement sometimes made, that Roman civilisation never extended beyond the cities—that the _country_ of such provinces of Gaul and Spain was still barbarian—that there was no civilisation or humanity _here_ for Goth or German to destroy. We cannot wonder, at all events, that there was no patriotism to withstand their invasion. Their invasion was a restoration of the _country_, if it was a temporary destruction of the _town_. And even in the large towns, while the system of slavery endured, the industrial arts, and even studious and liberal professions, never received their due honour and due encouragement. Wealth and military and civil appointments were the only valid or generally recognised claims to social distinction.

We must take our leave of Dr Liddell’s book, again commending it to the student. In a passage we quoted from the preface, the author says that if less of positive history is laid before the reader than in some older books, “he will, at all events, find less that he will have to unlearn.” We venture to think that there is still a good deal set down here as history which the student will have to unlearn. But we make no objection to the work on this account; for every student must be solicitous to know what is the last hypothesis of eminently learned men. There has been an overflow, in our own times, of conjectural history. As it chiefly concerned the dry details of civil government, and the development of constitutional laws, the free employment of a conjectural method was disguised: this flood, we may venture confidently to say, is now receding.

Additions of this kind, made by one able man, will be destroyed by another; but it does not follow on this account that there has not been a real progress made in the study of Roman history. This progress chiefly consists in the discrimination made in the comparative value of the materials which have come down to us. “In the first two centuries after the invention of printing,” says Sir G. C. Lewis, “the entire history of Rome was in general treated as entitled to implicit belief; all ancient authors were put upon the same footing, and regarded as equally credible; all parts of an author’s work were, moreover, supposed to rest upon the same basis. Not only was Livy’s authority as high as that of Thucydides or Tacitus, but his account of the kings was considered as credible as that of the wars with Hannibal, Philip, Antiochus, or Perseus; and again, the lives of Romulus, Numa, or Coriolanus by Plutarch, were deemed as veracious as those of Fabius Maximus, Sylla, or Cicero. Machiavel, in his _Discourses on the First Decade of Livy_, takes this view of the early history. The seven kings of Rome are to him not less real than the twelve Cæsars; and the examples which he derives from the early period of the Republic are not less certain and authentic than if they had been selected from the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, or of Cæsar and Pompey.” An instance so striking as this of Machiavel ought to give us a double lesson, one of modesty and one of confidence;—of modesty, because we too may be involved in some general and prevailing error; of confidence, because where the reason of the case is clear, no name or authority, however great, ought to influence our convictions.

MONTEIL.[4]

To struggle for literary fame—to devote forty years to the composition of an imperishable work—to toil amid pain and sickness, and the growing infirmities of age—never to be appreciated during all the period of that laborious existence except by the chosen few—and finally to die in poverty, perhaps in want—and then, when you have long been buried, and your name is nearly forgotten, your work to get slowly but surely into circulation, and to be pronounced a master-piece—this is the fate of few; but it was the fate of Amans Alexis Monteil, author of the _History of the French of Various Conditions_—a book of amazing research, great skill in composition, picturesque, humorous, and characteristic, and now received as the sovereign authority upon all the subjects on which it treats. The author was worthy of the work. Its object is to give a clear description of the French people, as they presented themselves to their contemporaries during the five last centuries. Old cartularies are ransacked, baptismal registers consulted, manners and habits inquired into; the private life of the tradesman, of the merchant, of the labourer, earnestly investigated, and brought before us with the distinctness of a picture. And Alexis himself—he was more undecipherable than a charter of the time of Clovis, more dusty, begrimed, and antiquated than the records of a Benedictine monastery: nobody knew him; he breakfasted, dined (when he dined at all), and supped alone. Yet that man of parchment had a heart, loved passionately, mourned deeply, hoped ardently, and had such wit, such observation, such combination! Half of his qualities remind us of Dominie Sampson, and the other half of Sydney Smith. Let us dip into the contents of his volumes and the history of his life; and first of the man.

Poor old Alexis, amid the desolation of his later years, fled for consolation to the past. He revived the scenes of his youth, flew back to his native town, and gave daguerreotypes, in an autobiography which he never finished, of his father, his mother, his brothers, the people he had known, and the very stones he remembered in the walls. These reminiscences are very minute. Of course they are, for it was the habit of the man’s mind to record the smallest particulars. He preferred them indeed to great ones. He would rather know the number of buttons on a general’s coat than the battles he had won. So his father is brought before us in his habit as he lived. This worthy man had had losses, like Dogberry, and, like that great functionary, had also held authority in his native town. The town was a very small town, and the authority not great; but it was enough: it gave rank; it gave dignity; and the son records it as evidence that he came of gentle kin.

It was in the small city of Rhodez, partly situated in Auvergne and partly in Rouergue, that Monsieur Jean Monteil, before the French Revolution, held the office of receiver of fines and forfeits. This does not seem a lofty post, but the worthy holder managed, by a little ingenuity, and a lawsuit which lasted six years, to get it recognised as one of the offices of the crown, inasmuch as the fines were those levied by a royal court; and he was therefore as much a king’s servant as the procureur himself. On the strength of this connection with the administration, of justice, Monsieur Monteil wore a hat with a gold band, a gown also with a similar ornament; and on Sundays and fête days he had a right to march to the church, looking the embodiment of a beadle, and of sitting on a raised place near the altar, and being “incensed” by the officiating priests. His son dwells with filial pride on the noble figure his progenitor presented to the eyes of his fellow-townsmen, as he walked along the street with his gold-headed cane, and lifted his three-cornered hat in answer to the salutations of all who saw him. How long this went on we are not told; but one day the alarm-bell frightened the town of Rhodez from its propriety. The Revolution had found its way to the deepest recesses of Auvergne, and the Reign of Terror began. The guillotine showed its hideous shape in the main street; war was declared against aristocrats; and who could be more clearly proved to belong to that doomed body than the portly gentleman with the gold-laced hat and the gold-handled ivory staff? John Monteil and the Dukes of Montmorency were equally worthy of death. There was no place left for De Grammonts or Monteils, and the servant of the king was no more saluted with respectful bows as he paraded his official costume on the first sound of the bell which called the faithful to church, and was no longer received with humble obeisances by the priests before the service began. In a short time there were no bells to ring; they were melted down to make sou-pieces by order of the Convention. Then there were no priests; they were all executed or banished, or had enlisted in the armies of the Republic: and finally there was no church; it was turned into a prison for the refractory; and John Monteil laid aside his gilded toga, and his cocked-hat, and his cane, and hid himself as well as he was able in the dark parlour of his house. There he gave himself up to despair. And no wonder; the blow had fallen so unexpectedly, and death was on every side. He only waited till his turn should come; and at last it came. In the days of his grandeur he had taken into his service two of the boys of Rhodez—one Jerome Delpech, who seems to have had no family tree at all, and Jules Bauleze, the son of a poor sempstress. They had acted as his clerks, and were grateful to their old employer. They were now engaged in the public offices, and saw the whole tragedy as it went on. From time to time they slipt into the darkened parlour, and said, “Be on your guard”—“Fly”—“Save yourself.” But John Monteil did not know whither to fly. All France was nothing but a scaffold, so he staid at home.

The two clerks came near him no more. They were suspected. Jerome Delpech died of the jail fever, waited on in his illness by his old master; and Jules Bauleze, the son of the sempstress, he was accused of being an aristocrat: the fact could not be denied, and he was executed in front of the town-hall. Then the Committee of Public Safety began to tremble for the liberty and equality of the nation if such a very exalted personage as Monsieur Monteil were suffered to live. So the ci-devant beadle is dragged to prison—to the very church, the scene of his weekly glories—where he sat on the front bench, and white-robed choristers swung censers under his nose till he was nearly suffocated with perfume (and smoke); and here, at the eastern end of the melancholy ruin (for the windows were taken out, and the ornamental work all carried away) he saw the sempstress Bauleze kneeling in an agony of silent grief at the remains of the broken altar. She had been thrown into confinement as the mother of an aristocrat, and would probably on the following day be his companion on the scaffold. But before the following day, Robespierre’s reign was over, and the two representatives of the aristocracy of Rhodez were saved. What now is Monsieur Jean Monteil to do? He is nothing if not magisterial. Rob him of his robes, and what is he? A poor man indeed, more sinned against than sinning, reduced to leave the splendours of his native city, and, like Diocletian, plant cabbages in retirement. He occupied a cottage, and cultivated a few fields. But there was still left to him, companion and soother of his griefs, the gentle Marie Mazet, whom he had married when they were both in the sunshine of prosperity—both distinguished for birth and station; for she was the daughter of a mercer who sold the finest cloths in the town, and claimed some sort of unknown kindred with the Bandinellis of Italy and the Maffettes of France. But this lofty genealogy was due to the antiquarian zeal of her husband. She herself only knew that Italy was a long way off, and that the Bandinellis and the Maffettes were probably no better than they should be. So she did not keep her head an inch higher on account of her noble origin, but was the most sedate, quiet, economical, pains-taking manager of a household that Rhodez had ever seen. She sang, but only at church, or over the cradles of her children; she walked, but only to mass or vespers; she lived, as was the custom of good housewives then, in the kitchen, presided at table, helping the young ones, cleaning up the dishes, ironing the clothes, arranging, settling, ordering all—a charming picture of a good mother of a family; and no wonder her son dwells with affecting tenderness over the details of his early home. And the vintage! The labours of the whole house were suspended on that blessed occasion. The dry and dusty streets were left behind; old and young took their way rejoicing to the vineyard which Monsieur Monteil possessed a few miles from the town; and even Madame Monteil forgot her cares—forgot her economics, and renewed her youth in the midst of the universal joy. A harvest-home is a delightful sound in English or Scottish ears; it recalls the merry dance, the rustic feast, the games in the barn, the ballad, the smoking bowl,—but what are all these to the vintage? The harvest itself consists in wine. The children of the south kindle with enthusiasm at the very sound of the word; and Bacchus and the ancient gods seem once more to revisit the earth in a visible shape. All Rouergue was in a ferment of enjoyment the moment the grapes were ripe; but even then the mother of the future historian had hours of serious reflection. With her hand clasped in the hand of her silent thoughtful little boy, she looked often, long, and in silence, out of the window of the summer-house, her eyes lifted to the sky, her mouth mantling with a smile, sunk in an ecstasy of holy contemplation, such as we see in Ary Scheffer’s noble picture of St Augustin and his Mother. “What are you thinking of, dear wife?” said Monsieur Jean Monteil. “On eternity,” she replied in a soft voice, and gave her little boy’s hand a warmer clasp. It must be from the maternal side Alexis derived his quiet strength, and the exquisite feeling of romance which enables him to realise the states of society, the sentiments and family connections so long past away. A mother like this would have been a fatal loss at any time; but happening when it did, the blow was irrecoverable. So good a manager might have restored the family fortunes; so loved a parent might have kept the sons united and respectable; “but she fell into the dust,” says Alexis, seventy years after her death, “and our household was ruined for ever.” These are strange revelations of the interior economy of an obscure family, in one of the most obscure of the provinces of France, before and during the Revolution: and the curtain rises and falls upon all the sons; for Alexis survived his brothers, and traces them with a light and graceful hand from the cradle to the grave. The eldest was old enough to know the distinction of his position as heir of the family name, when the Revolution broke out, and buried Jean Baptiste Jacques under the ruins of the feudal system. He had studied for the law—he had, in fact, had the honour of being called to the bar, and, by his great eloquence and knowledge, of getting his client—the only one he had—condemned to the galleys for life. But he, like his father, was forced to put off the gown, and, unlike his father, who stayed to brave the tempest at home, he fled. Meanly, ignominiously he fled, and hid himself amid the retired valleys of the Gevaudan, where he thought nobody would find him out, and where he might boast of his loyalty and sufferings without danger. But his boastings brought dangers from which greatness could not be exempt. A certain loyalist of the name of Charrie—a peasant who thought that a few of his fellow-labourers could restore the _fleur-de-lis_ on the points of their pitchforks and other agricultural implements with which they armed themselves—heard of the exiled magnate who made the echoes of the Gevaudan vocal with his lamentations and cries for vengeance, and came to the gownless advocate and made him colonel of the ragged regiment on the spot! Here was a choice of evils. If he refused the colonelcy, he would in a few minutes be cut into many hundred pieces by the scythes of the furious Legitimists; if he accepted, he was certain in a few weeks to be guillotined for rebellion against the Republic. But as weeks are better than minutes, he accepted the honourable rank, and Colonel Jean Baptiste showed himself at the head of his troops, and armed himself with a reaping-hook, which looked like a Turkish scimitar with the bend the wrong way. He armed himself also with a white cockade, which had the remarkable property of presenting the tricolor when turned inside out; and, prepared for either fortune, retained, as it were, on both sides, the colonel-advocate considered himself secure whatever might happen. But Charrie was not so blind as was thought. The trick was found out, and the colonel fled: he ran, he climbed, he struggled over walls, he staggered across gardens,—the scythemen, the pitchforkmen, the reaping-hookmen, the flailmen after him; and by dint of quick running, and artful turnings, and scientific doubles he might have been safe; but a dreadful outcry in an outhouse, the infuriate babblings of turkey-cocks, the hissing of geese, the quacking of ducks, betrayed him. He had concealed himself in a hen-roost, and the denizens of the poultry-yard had regarded neither the tricolor nor the white cockade. In spite of his duplicity and cowardice, he got off. Happier than Charrie, who paid for his brief authority with his head, the eldest hope of the Monteils lived in peaceful obscurity, cultivating potatoes, both red and white, and brewing the best wine of the district, till having planted and brewed all through the first wars of the Empire, he died at sixty, forgetful alike of his legal studies and military adventures, and only doubtful as to the superiority of the long kidney or the pink-eyed rounds.

The next was a wit—a _roué_ to the extent of a few rows on the street, and a poet to the extent of a few lampoons on the respectable dignitaries of Rhodez. He tore off the knockers of the street-doors, changed the sign-boards of different tradesmen, and went through the usual stages of a fast young gent’s career. He proceeded to Paris, determining to be chancellor; he moderated his desires in a few years, and would have been satisfied to be a peer of France; he sank lower still, and would have accepted anything he could get, but he could get nothing, so he became a land-measurer of the humblest kind, retained his gaiety to the last, sang his own little songs and repeated his own little epigrams, and died of corpulence and laziness at the age of eighty-two, as happy, perhaps, as if his dreams of ambition had been fulfilled. The third and last brother was the black sheep of the flock. He enlisted in the hopeful time for any one who had courage and a sword, in 1793, and might have been a Soult, or a Ney, or a Murat. Instead of that, he was an idle, dissipated dog, who sank from vice to vice, till, having some musical talent and great strength of wrist, which obtained him the situation of drummer in the regiment, he behaved so ill that some brother of the trade was employed to drum him out of the army, and he returned to his home, living at his impoverished father’s expense—getting a dinner where he could—drinking when he could obtain wine—gambling when he could borrow a button to toss with—useless, shameless, heartless; and when the old man died, and the cottage passed to strangers, and his contemporaries had perished, and the new generation knew him no more, he found his way to Paris, wandered through the streets in search of an hospital, was so thin and worn and broken down that he was admitted without certificate, and lay down on a crib in the charitable ward and died: and this the result of the education and the example given by Monsieur Jean Monteil of Rhodez, and the gentle Marie Mazet! Was it for this they were so strict in honour, so pure in heart, so tender in affection, only to produce a coward, an idler, and a beggar? The fate of families well and carefully brought up, circled round “by father’s blessing, mother’s prayer,” during all their youth, and giving way at once to the excesses of vice, and sinking into the abysses of shame, is one of the most curious of our everyday experiences. Are we to blame the parents? They have done the best they could; but Tom gets a commission, and is cashiered; Billy gets into a bank, and forges a draft; Harry goes to the bar, and drinks himself to death at the cider-cellar; and the proud and chivalrous old father, the soft and affectionate mother, after mourning for a few years in the small lodging to which the extravagance of their family has reduced them, die of broken hearts. But in the case of the Monteils there was one redeeming point: one son was all they could wish in the way of affection, of uprightness, of quietness, and devotion to his books. There was Amans Alexis studying from morn to night—very shy—very awkward—very queer—caring nothing for society—knowing little of anything that had occurred since the battle of Pavia—insatiate in his hunger after old scraps of manuscript—starting off, stick in hand, bread in pocket, if he heard that in some miserable valley among the hills there had been a demolition going on of a monastery, or rotten old chest discovered among the rat-holes of some tatterdemalion town-hall. The odd-looking youth, tired and travel-stained, saw at a glance if the muniment-chest was old and useless enough to be of any value; he opened the moth-eaten lid, and saw a file of moth-eaten papers. In a moment he ran over the hieroglyphics they contained. The language they were written in, though Latin in name, would have puzzled Cicero and the College of Augurs to interpret a syllable. Alexis read them off like round-hand, and bought them—sixpence—ninepence—a franc—and the treasure was his. He turned his heels on the monastery or the town-hall, and pursued his way to Paris. He goes to the Depository of the Archives of France. “Do you want an original charter granted by Louis le Hutin to the Abbey of St Bernard de Romans in Dauphiny?” “Certainly. It is worth its weight in gold;” and it is now a valued article in the Bibliothèque Impériale.