year 1814. All the leaders, royal or not royal, in the three immortal campaigns of Moscow (1812), of Leipsic (1813), and of France (1814), were just then in London, and paying a visit of honour to our own Regent. There was the reigning King of Prussia, whom most people likened to "the knight of the rueful countenance." There was the king's sole faithful servant-Blucher. There was the imperial fop, Alexander, and in his train men of sixty different languages; and, distinguished above all others that owed suit and service to this great potentate, rode Platoff, the Hetman of the Cossacks, specially beloved by all men as the most gallant, adventurous, and ugly of Cossacks. These Cossacks, if one might believe the flying rumours, drank with rapture every species of train oil. The London lamps were then lighted with oil; and the Cossacks, it was said, gave it the honour of a decided preference: so that, in streets lying near to the hetman's residence, to the north of Oxford Street, the lamps were observed to burn with a very variable lustre. In such a street I, and others, my companions, returning from a ball, about an hour before sunrise, saw a mimic sketch of the decaying Oracles. Here, close to the hetman's front-door, was a large overshadowing lamp, that might typify the Delphic shrine, but (to borrow a word from kitchen-maids) "black out." It was supposed to have been tapped too frequently by the hetman's sentinels who mounted guard on his Tartar Highness. Then, on the other side the street, was a lamp, ancient and gloomy, that might pass for Dodona, throwing up sickly and fitful gleams of undulating lustre, but drawing near to extinction. Further ahead was a huge octagon lamp, that apparently never had been cleaned from smoke and fuliginous tarnish, forlorn, solitary, yet grimly alight, though under a disastrous eclipse, and ably supporting the part of Jupiter Ammon-that unsocial oracle which stood aloof from men in a narrow oasis belted round by worlds of sandy wilderness. And in the midst of all these vast and venerable mementoes rose one, singularly pert and lively, though not bigger than a farthing rushlight, which probably had singly escaped the Cossacks, as having promised nothing; so that the least and most trivial of the entire group was likely to survive them all.

Briefly, the Oracles went out-lamp after lamp—as we see oftentimes in some festal illumination that one glass globe of light capriciously outlives its neighbour. Or they might be described as melting away like snow on the gradual return of vernal breezes. Large drifts vanish in a few hours; but patches here and there, lurking in the angles of high mountainous grounds, linger on into summer. Yet, whatever might have been their distinctions or their advantages on collation with each other, none of the ancients ever appear to have considered their pretensions to divination or prescience (whether by the reading of signs, as in the flight of birds, in the entrails of sacrificial victims, or, again, in direct spiritual prevision) as forming any conspicuous feature of their ordinary duties. Accordingly, when Cato in the Pharsalia is advised by Labienus to seek the counsel of Jupiter Ammon, whose sequestered oracle was then near enough to be reached without much extra trouble, he replies by a fine abstract of what might be expected from an oracle : viz. not predictions, but grand sentiments bearing on the wisdom of life. These representative sentiments, as shaped by Lucan, are fine and noble; we might expect it from a poet so truly Roman and noble. But he dismisses these oracular sayings as superfluous, because already familiar to meditative men. We know them,

"Scimus "-(says he)

"Et hæc nobis non altius inseret Ammon." And no Ammon will ever engraft them more deeply into my heart.

This I mention, when concluding, as a further and collateral evidence against the Fathers. For, if any mode of prophetic illumination had been the sort of communication reasonably and characteristically to be anticipated from an Oracle, in that case Lucan would have pointed his artillery from a very different battery,—the battery of scorn and indignation. No people certainly could be more superstitious than the Roman populace. witness the everlasting Bos locutus est of the credulous Livy. Yet, on the other hand, already in the early days of Ennius, we know, by one of his beautiful fragments, that no nation could breed more highminded denouncers of such misleading follies.

THE ESSENES 1

PART I. THE TRADITION FROM JOSEPHUS

SOME months back we published a little Essay, that might easily be expanded into a very large volume, and ultimately into a perfectly new Philosophy of Roman History, in proof that Rome was self-barbarised,—barbarised ab intra, and not by foreign enemies. The evidences of this, (1) in the death of her literature, and (2) in the instant oblivion which swallowed up all public transactions, are so obvious as to

1 The paper appeared originally in three parts in Blackwood's Magazine for January, April, and May 1840. When it was reprinted by De Quincey in 1859, in the tenth volume of his Collected Writings, it was very much shortened by two omissions: viz. (1) the omission of the four introductory paragraphs to the whole, (2) the omission of Part II altogether. What may have been De Quincey's reasons for these omissions one cannot now conjecture,-if indeed he had any reasons, and the omissions were not in some manner the result of accident. In the case of the second and more important omission, it is possible that he was reserving the matter for some separate use, e.g. in an independent paper on Josephus generally, apart from Josephus as the describer of the Essenes,-which intention he did not live to carry out; or it is just possible that, in one of his hours of somnolence in the last year of his life, his editorial vigilance failed him, so that this paper went to press with an unperceived gap in the copy. At all events, the omissions are so serious, and the second of them so affects the integrity and coherence of the paper, that the restoration of the omitted portions is imperative. The American edition, printing direct from Blackwood, gives the paper in its complete state; and it would be an injury to it with its British readers to do otherwise in the present edition. The paper is, accordingly, here divided into three "Parts," as originally; and to each part is prefixed what appears to be a suitable sub-title.-M.

challenge notice from the most inattentive reader.1 For instance, as respects the latter tendency, what case can be more striking than the fact that Trebellius Pollio,2 expressly dedicating himself to such researches, and having the state documents at his service, cannot trace, by so much as the merest outline, the biography of some great officers who had worn the purple as rebels, though actually personal friends of his own grandfather? So nearly connected as they were with his own age and his own family, yet had they utterly perished for want of literary memorials ! A third indication of barbarism, in the growing brutality of the Army and the Emperor, is of a nature to impress many readers even more powerfully, and especially by contrast with the spirit of Roman warfare in its Republican period. Always it had been an insolent and haughty warfare; but, upon strong motives of policy, sparing in bloodshed. Whereas, latterly, the ideal of a Roman general was approaching continually nearer to the odious standard of a caboceer amongst the Ashantees. Listen to the father of his people (Gallienus) issuing his paternal commands for the massacre, in cold blood, of a whole district-not foreign but domestic-after the offence had become almost obsolete: "Non satisfacies

mihi, si tantum armatos occideris quos et fors belli interimere potuisset. Perimendus est omnis sexus virilis": and, lest even this sweeping warrant should seem liable to any merciful distinctions, he adds circumstantially—“ Sic et senes atque impuberes sine mea reprehensione occidi possent." And thus the bloody mandate winds up: "Occidendus est quicunque male voluit, occidendus est quicunque male dixit contra me lacera, occide, concide." 3 Was ever such a

1 The Essay to which De Quincey refers is his " Philosophy of Roman History," which had appeared in Blackwood in November 1839, two months before the First Part of the present paper. See the Essay itself ante, Vol. VI. pp. 429-447.-M.

2 One of the writers of the Augustan History, living early in the fourth century.-M.

3 The quotations may be Englished thus:-"You will not satisfy me if you kill only the armed men, whom the mere chance of war itself might have cut off. The whole male sex must be exterminated."-"There would be no blame from me if both the old and those not yet of age could be slain."- "Let there be killed every one who has wished me ill; let there be killed every one who has spoken ill against me : slash, kill, massacre."-M.

rabid tiger found, except amongst the Hyder Alis or Nadir Shahs of half-civilized or decivilized tribes? Yet another and a very favourite Emperor outherods even this butcher, by boasting of the sabring which he had let loose amongst crowds of helpless women.

The fourth feature of the Roman barbarism upon which we insisted, viz. the growing passion for trivial anecdotage in slight of all nobler delineations, may be traced, in common with all the other features, to the decay of a public mind and a common connecting interest amongst the different members of that vast imperial body. This was a necessity arising out of the merely personal tenure by which the throne was held. Competition for dignities, ambition under any form, could not exist with safety under circumstances which immediately attracted a blighting jealousy from the highest quarter. Where hereditary succession was no fixed principle of state-no principle which all men were leagued to maintain—every man, in his own defence, might be made an object of anxiety in proportion to his public merit. Not conspiring, he might still be placed at the head of a conspiracy. There was no oath of allegiance taken to the Emperor's family, but only to the Emperor personally. But, if it was thus dangerous for a man to offer himself as a participator in state honours, on the other hand it was impossible for a people to feel any living sympathy with a public grandeur in which they could not safely attempt to participate. Simply to be a member of this vast body was no distinction at all: honour could not attach to what was universal. One path only lay open to personal distinction; and that, being haunted along its whole extent by increasing danger, naturally bred the murderous spirit of retaliation or pre-occupation. It is besides certain that the very change wrought in the nature of warlike rewards and honours contributed to cherish a spirit of atrocity amongst the officers. Triumphs had been granted of old for conquests; and these were generally obtained much more by intellectual qualities than by any display of qualities merely or rudely martial. Triumphs were now forbidden fruit to any officer less than Augustan. And this one change, had there been no other, sufficed to throw the efforts of military men into a direction more humble, more directly