create for the extensive and great intercommunication that would be developed between Australasia and South America. The actual distance from New Zealand across that part of South America to Europe was rather less than the distance by the Isthmus of Central America; and there was another consideration connecting Australia inti

mately with Chile, namely, a ship running a few hundred miles to the north, from Copiapo or Caldera, got into the heart of the trade-wind, which would carry her across to Australasia. On the other hand, by running a little south from Australia or New Zealand a ship would get into the south-westerly winds, which would carry her right across to Chile; so that a ship without steam might make the voyage either way in five or six weeks without having to guard against intervening land or peculiar danger of any kind beyond that of an oceanic passage without a hurricane.

The voyage from England to Rosario is stated to occupy from twentyfive to thirty days: from Liverpool to Montevideo, however, has recently been done in twenty-one days. Five days, at a slow rate of travelling, would be ample for the thousand miles of railway; so that in about two months mails and passengers might reach Australia from England, and vice versa. That this great work will be effected in time we believe, without venturing to predict how soon. The projector, however, is confident as to

the immediate extension of it towards the interior as soon as the first section to Cordova is completed, which the contractor is bound to do by May, 1869.

The last advices inform us that eight or nine miles of rail was already completed out of Rosario;

and that about one-half of the line is expected to be opened in the course of next year.

The Panama isthmus has already its railway, to the great ease and comfort of traffic. In the North

are vast; and though railways American republics the distances reach far towards the head waters of the Mississippi, no scheme, as far as we know, has ever been proposed for their extension towards Oregon and California. In Canada the Grand Trunk runs six or seven hundred miles inland from the seaboard towards the interior. Visions have already risen of an extension towards Columbia; and it would be hard to say what may happen in the remote future of that most promising dependency. But the distance still to be done is double the whole length of the Argentine line, the climate severe, and, though the mountains are much lower, the engineering difficulties of that water-afflicted country must be extreme.

LONG before our notice of this

history can be in type it will have been studied by many readers in many languages. The friends and foes of its author alike will strive to glean from its pages a justification of their several opinions of the present government of France; for although this Life of Cæsar is not an allegory, yet it is unquestionably an attempt to compare old things with new. Nor can we be justly twitted with suggesting resemblances between 'Macedon and Monmouth,' since there are more analogies between Paris as it is and Rome as it was nineteen hundred years ago, than the mere accident of there being a river in both.' We believe, therefore, that we are not doing injustice to the imperial author by supposing him to have thrown a glove into the political arena, or that, under the garb of an historian, he is giving us a treatise on European, though perhaps not English, affairs. In this respect he does not differ from many French and some German writers who have recently taken Rome or the Cæsars for their text. The Comte de Champagny preaches one kind of sermon on this theme, M. Dubois de Guchan another, in their excellent works; and Drumann, in his learned history of Roman revolutions, occasionally hints that the Prussian monarchy is not far remote from the best of all possible governments. If such parallels be fairly drawn, and not strained too tight, they impart a lively interest to oft-told stories. When a person in his company talked of the second Punic war, Dr. Johnson, we know, twirled his thumbs, sat back in his chair, and kept a surly silence. But the great moralist, we also know, held history in general very cheap; and in his day Roman history was as tedious in modern hands as kings. Hooke, Ferguson, and Rollin, furnished a a good excuse for declining discussion. The subject, however, derives new interest in our times, as well

* Histoire de Jules César.

from the excellence of many recent works upon it, as from the fact that modern Europe now presents certain analogies with ancient Rome. Perhaps even Johnson, who was alive to the present under every aspect, might now think Cæsar a fitting object for his emphatic 'Yes, sir,' or 'No, sir.'

They who enact history themselves deserve, and are pretty certain of, attention when they take up the pen; and sorry scribes indeed must they be if they do not teach us more than we can learn from ordinary historians. Napoleon, writing from the palace of the Tuileries, might excite curiosity even in the sceptical Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert, indeed, might repeat his dictum, Child, this cannot be true,' yet he would hardly affect or preserve indifference towards a writer so experienced in either fortune as the present Emperor of the French. Be opinions what they may of the steps by which he ascended from prison and exile to the greatest of continental thrones, his extraordinary abilities cannot be denied neither has he come to his recent work as a 'prentice-hand,' for his earlier writings, political and scientific, prove him to be the owner of no ordinary pen. He is a man of speculation as well as action; and such men, if often the most partial, are often, also, the most instructive of historians. Such union of the 'theorique with the practique' renders Thucydides and Machiavelli the admirable guides they are through the maze of Grecian and Italian politics: such, in a lesser degree, makes the Spartanizing Xenophon and the royalist Clarendon so valuable for all who would understand the decay of the Greek, and the rise, progress, and rapid decline of the English Commonwealth. With all his eloquence, the mere bookman, Livy, who had never set a squadron in the field, nor pleaded a single cause in the Forum, is comparatively ineffective:

while such writers as Dionysius and Diodorus, possessing neither experience in affairs nor skill in writing, are scarcely readable. In nearly every page of Tacitus we feel that the genius of the author has been nerved and disciplined by his public services; in the books of Dion Cassius we equally feel that the mere fact of having held a military command does not qualify an author to deal with the vicissitudes of a nation, or the policy of statesmen. At once far inferior and far superior to some of these writers, the author of The Life of Julius Caesar brings to his task the experience of an active and meditative life; and while we think that he commits grave faults, we acknowledge the general ability of his narrative.

The history of Rome, since the revival of learning, has passed through several phases. First came the age of faith in whatsoever was written in Latin books. Then an age of reason, in which men of philosophic minds, like Machiavelli and Montesquieu wrote political commentaries on the facts as they found them. Lastly, the facts themselves were winnowed and sifted, and from the time of Beaufort to the present day, there have been continual attempts to reconstruct Roman history on new principles. The French Emperor's work belongs less to the third than to the two former of these classes. Like Montesquieu he handles them philosophically; like the early Italian philologers he generally accepts them with trust in the ancient writers.

There is a comedy by Scribe, entitled Avant, Pendant, et Après, it being the process of a story commencing before the Revolution of 1789, continuing during the Empire, and closing after the Restoration of the Bourbons. Somewhat similar in construction is the Life of Julius Cæsar. More than one half of this first volume of it consists of prolegomena; and in the remainder the hero scarcely stands apart from his leading contemporaries. He was not, indeed, at the time, and he scarcely appears in the imperial narrative of him greater than Sulla

or Pompeius; he has not much more open influence than Cicero, Cato, or other senatorian chiefs. He was even thus early, indeed, partly from fear and partly from hope of him, the observed of all observers in Rome. But he has not become, when this volume closes, the foremost man of all the world. We await the second volume for the full dimensions of the mighty Julius,' and the third for the results of the revolution which he consummated,-results which it is not extravagant to say with Gibbon, will ever be remembered, and are still felt by the nations of the earth.”

In the following remarks we shall deal principally with the Prolegomena, reserving for some future opportunity the character and the immediate or transmitted influence of Cæsar himself. It will be easier as well as more convenient to survey his entire career at the moment when his schemes were complete, when the position he aimed at, as is generally believed from the first, was attained, and when the great soldier and the successful statesman were combined in the dictator, the founder, if not the actual constructor of the greatest of universal monarchies.

Some notice of the Preface must, however, precede our remarks on the Prolegomena. A preface rarely conveys more knowledge of a book than is absolutely necessary to explain the author's design. There are, indeed, some exceptions to this rule, but these are more apparent than real. Casaubon's celebrated preface to Polybius is a kind of running comment on his author, the purpose of Polybius in writing, his position as a practical statesman, mingled with direct or covert allusions to the League, the Guises, and Henry IV. That preface is the Adam or the Noah of the presentation of current affairs under the mask of ancient history. But even this and similar introductions are not keynotes to the work they precede: whereas the French Emperor's Preface, if we understand it rightly, is by no means the least important or the least significant portion of his volume. It is short, but it is very

pregnant with meaning: it enunciates precepts and principles which, if true, are momentous, and if not true, demand grave consideration.

To the Emperor's assertion of the duty of historians to regard truth as not less sacred than religion, we devoutly subscribe. The lesson indeed is not new, but it is not the less wholesome: for disregard of it has piled the shelves of libraries with tons of rubbish, and worse than this negative inconvenience, has stimulated and influenced some of the worst passions of human nature. That facts alone without philosophic insight into their causes and consequences are comparatively uninstructive, we also admit. Only we would be less trenchant than the illustrious author is in his desire to put out of court, if not altogether extinguish, all writers who deal with facts without any seasoning of philosophy. Writers such as Suetonius are excellent adjuncts to writers such as Tacitus: and superior as Hallam is to such a chronicler as Baker, we confess ourselves as sharing in Sir Roger's partiality for that simple and garrulous remembrancer. When, however, the Emperor discourses on the means by which truth may be pursued and attained, he puzzles us. We are, it seems, to follow the rule of logic! 'Logic' unquestionably is a most important condition of thought and style, in poetry and in prose alike. But in composing an historical work at what moment are we to begin to apply it? Sir Pandarus of Troy says, 'He that will have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding, the bolting, the leavening,' and sundry other needful if tedious processes. Pandarus is, indeed, discoursing on love-a species, it may be said, of fiction; yet his observations apply nearly as well to historical facts. The cake,' demands many kinds of manipulation before it is fit for the eater; and we had, until we read this passage, fondly imagined that the collection, comparison, sorting, substantiating of facts, must precede their logical arrangement or their rhetorical ornament. Next we are left in the

dark as to the nature of historical logic. There is a formal logic in which the schoolmen and Gil Blas de Santillane were proficients. There is a transcendental logic, practised, and it is to be hoped understood, in Germany, and recommended by Coleridge, though he is not very happy in defining or exemplifying it. But can it be either the formal or the transcendental which the Emperor enjoins us to employ in history? In the one case history must be brief, in the other it would probably be obscure. We trust that in a later edition our minds will be set at rest on this point; at present they are perplexed in the extreme. There is indeed a logic of the sword; and a certain philosopher declined arguing against the master of thirty legions, as being syllogisms too formidable to be dealt with comfortably. This, however, can hardly be the logic recommended in the second page of the preface.

With a passage immediately succeeding this recommendation we fully concur:

The task (of the historian) consists then in seeking the vital element which constituted the strength of the institution, as the predominant idea which actuated the man. In following this rule we shall avoid the errors of those historians who collect the facts transmitted by preceding ages, without arranging them according to their philosophical worth, thus glorifying that which merits blame, and leaving in shadow that which is appealing to the light. It is not the minute analysis of the Roman organization that will make us understand the duration of so great an empire, but the profound examination of the spirit of its institutions; no more is it the recital in detail of the least actions of a superior man that will discover to us the secret of his ascendancy, but the attentive investigation of the elevated motives of his conduct.

Here again the concluding sentence rather disconcerts us. Historians and biographers in every age and country have been well enough inclined to infer motives from facts, and to judge of characters by inferred motives. 'Brother Martin,' said Leo X., has a fine genius and is looking out for preferment at our hands.' The facts might seem to a Pope of a tolerably worldly complexion to warrant the impu

tation of motives: yet, in spite of all appearances and experience, Luther was not looking out for preferment at the Pope's hands. Greed of the goods of the Church is some times said to have been Henry VIII.'s motive for suppressing monasteries; and advancement of himself is still popularly believed to have been Bacon's leading motive from the moment he could discern between good and evil. On examination of the facts in each case, it cannot be shown with the certainty such allegations demand before they are received, that such motives actuated either the king or the chancellor. Facts again are stubborn things, motives are pliant. With the same facts, but with an opposite set of motives, one historian represents Cromwell as an arch-hypocrite, another as almost the only sincere person of the time. To Samuel Johnson Milton's motives for returning to England at the outbreak of the civil war seem ludicrous; to Dr. Symmons and to Professor Masson they appear patriotic. In the volume now before us all the motives of Pompeius, Cato, Cicero, Catulus, and Lucullus, present themselves under mean or odious forms to the author: to Middleton the same motives are objects of admiration. We are afraid of history becoming more enigmatic than ever if once we constitute ourselves discoverers of motives rather than recorders of facts.

Again, after recommendation of logic from so high a quarter, we have perhaps a right to look for it in the recommender's pages. On one point, however, in the Preface, if logic be present, we have not the gift to discover it. The ancients, their historians especially, oscillate between the idea of Providence and the idea of Fate in the government of human affairs. Prometheus, who from his birth and the company he kept before he fell into trouble may be supposed to have known whether Jupiter or the Fates were masters of all below the moon, is perversely silent on this question. He insinuates, indeed, that his old friend and present foe Jupiter had better not be saucy, inasmuch as there are powers stronger than himself. But

whether those powers are blind or sharp-sighted, whether they can say to the father of gods and men you are going too fast, or whether they are altogether neutral in mundane or extra-mundane politics, he cannot be induced to tell, even though his best friends are hinting to him that by telling he may hear of something to his advantage. The poets and the prose men of both Greece and Rome, unless indeed they are frontless atheists, cannot make up their minds on the subject. Tacitus, for example, at one time would lead us to infer that all things were left to chance, at another that they were guided by Providence. The pious Virgil is by turns a devout believer in the justice of the gods and a disciple of Epicurus, who put the gods under his footstool; and Claudian, who might have consulted Christian clergymen on the matter, writes about inexorable Fate as if he had never enjoyed the privilege of hearing sermons or of privately consulting the bishop of his diocese. The French Emperor fluctuates like the most subtle Greek or 'noblest Roman of them all.' He uses the words Fate and Providence indiscriminately, and takes sometimes the one and sometimes the other for his logical basis. At one moment Cæsar is implied to have followed a providential mission, at another to have been a tool in the hands of fatality. It is a wise child that knows its own father; yet if Destiny and Providence both claim it, and neither can produce the proper baptismal certificate, how is the poor child to decide between them?

Towards the close of the Preface, mankind, now and of yore, are roundly rated for failing at the proper time to hail the leaders whom Providence or Destiny is pleased to send them. But by what process, by reason or instinct, by tossing money, by counting noses, by thinking much, by not thinking at all, are we to enable ourselves to recognize the ruler whom the Fates are good enough to give us on certain occasions? We are blamed for the veil on our hearts by Cæsar's latest biographer, but we must feel that he is rather hard upon us. The Emperor Caligula is said to have