the ears of Zosimus,1 extorting, at every blow, a howl of Pagan sympathy from that bad and most howling of antichristian slanderers. So far from the fact being, according to the general prepossession, as though Constantine had found himself able to destroy Paganism, and to replace it by Christianity, on the contrary, it was both because he happened to be far too weak, in fact, for such a mighty revolution, and because he knew his own weakness, that he fixed his new capital, as a preliminary caution, upon the Propontis.

There were other motives to this change,2 and particularly (as I have attempted to show in a separate dissertation) motives of high political economy, suggested by the relative conditions of land and agriculture in Thrace and Asia Minor by comparison with decaying Italy; but a paramount motive, I am satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the incurable Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, it ought to have been remembered by historians, was a mere necessity of her Pagan origin. Paganism was the fatal dowry of Rome from her inauguration; not only she had once received a retaining fee on behalf of Paganism in the mysterious Ancile (or supernatural shield) supposed to have fallen from heaven, but she actually preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. She possessed a palladium, such a national amulet or talisman as many Grecian or Asiatic cities had once possessed-a fatal guarantee to the prosperity of the state. Even the Sibylline Books, whatever ravages they might be supposed by the intelligent to have sustained in a lapse of centuries, were popularly believed, in the latest period of the Western Empire, to exist as so many characters of supremacy. Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman physiognomy, which associated him with the destinies of

1 Zosimus, Greek historian, circa A.D. 400.-M.

The

2 The reader will find me here treading in the footsteps of a former essay. As the repetition is brief, and not at all in the same words, and occurring at different periods of time, I have seen no reason to cancel it. A kind interpreter of the case will rather regard it as an argument of my sincerity and self-consistency. real subject for wonder, as perhaps such an interpreter may be disposed to think, is that in such hurried essays, the Press always fretting at my irregularities, I did not oftener need to make similar apologies.

the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn augury of the Twelve Vultures, so memorably passed downwards from the days of Romulus, through generations as yet uncertain of the event, and therefore chronologically incapable of participation in any fraud-an augury always explained as promising twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 down to 452 A.D.-co-operated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which (and, though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work,1 for many years sought to fight off the evidences for that fact, yet afterwards partially he confessed his error) actually availed -historically and medallically can be demonstrated to have availed for the temptation of Christian Cæsars into collusive adulteries with heathenism. Here, for instance, came an emperor that timidly recorded his scruples-feebly protested, but gave way at once as to an ugly necessity. There came another, more deeply religious, or constitutionally more bold, who fought long and strenuously against the compromise. "What! should he, the delegate of God, and the standardbearer of the true religion, proclaim himself officially head of the false? No; that was too much for his conscience." But the fatal meshes of prescription, of superstitions ancient and gloomy, gathered around him; he heard that he was no perfect Cæsar without this office and eventually the very same reason which had obliged Augustus not to suppress, but himself to assume, the tribunitian office-namely, that it was a popular mode of leaving democratic organs untouched whilst he neutralised their democratic functions by absorbing them into his own-availed to overthrow all Christian scruples of conscience, even in the most Christian of the Cæsars. Many years after Constantine, the pious Theodosius found himself literally compelled to become a Pagan pontiff. A bon mot 2 circulating amongst the people warned him that,

1 Cardinal Cæsar Baronius (1538-1607), author of Ecclesiastical Annals.-M.

2 "A bon mot" :-This was built on the accident that a certain man VOL. VII

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if he left the cycle of imperial powers incomplete, if he suffered the galvanic battery to remain imperfect in its circuit of links, pretty soon he would tempt treason to show its head, and would even for the present find but an imperfect obedience. Reluctantly, therefore, the Emperor gave way: and perhaps soothed his fretting conscience by offering to Heaven, as a penitential litany, that same excuse which Naaman the Syrian offered to the prophet Elijah as a reason for a private personal dispensation. Hardly more possible it was that a camel should go through the eye of a needle than that a Roman Senator should forswear those inveterate superstitions with which his own system of patrician rank and privilege had been riveted for better and worse. soon would the Venetian Senator, the gloomy "magnifico" of St. Mark, have consented to renounce the annual wedding of his Republic with the Adriatic as the Roman noble, whether senator, or senator elect, or of senatorial descent, would have dissevered his own solitary stem from the great forest of his ancestral order; and this he must have done by doubting the legend of Jupiter Stator, or by withdrawing his allegiance from Jupiter, Capitolinus. The Roman People universally became agitated towards the opening of the fifth century after Christ, when their own twelfth century was drawing near to its completion. Rome had now reached the very condition of Dr. Faustus: having, like him, received a known term of prosperity from some dark power; but doomed, like him, to hear the revolving hours, one after one, tolling solemnly the summons to judgment, as they exhausted the waning minutes of that fatal day marked down in the contract. The more profound was the faith of Rome in the flight of the Twelve Vultures, once so glorious, now so sad, an augury, the deeper was the depression as the last hour drew near that had been so mysteriously prefigured. The whose proper name was Maximus stood in notorious circumstances of rivalship to the Emperor (Theodosius): and the bitterness of the jest took this turn-that, if the Emperor should persist in declining the office of Pontifex Maximus or Supreme Pontiff, in that case "erit Pontifex Maximus," Maximus (the secret aspirant) shall be our Pontifex-i.e. shall be our Emperor. So the words sounded to those in the secret (ovvETOLO), whilst to others they seemed to have no meaning at all.

reckoning, indeed, of chronology was slightly uncertain. The Varronian account varied from others. But these were trivial differences, and might tell as easily against them as for them, and did but strengthen the universal agitation. Alaric, in the opening of the fifth century (about 410)— Attila, near the middle (445)—already seemed prelusive earthquakes running before the final earthquake. And Christianity, during this era of public alarm, was so far from assuming a more winning aspect to Roman eyes, as a religion promising to survive their own, that already, under that character of reversionary triumph, this gracious religion seemed, by no fault of its own, a public insult, and this meek religion a clamorous defiance; pretty much as a king sees with scowling eyes, when revealed to him in some glass of Cornelius Agrippa, the phantom procession of that mysterious house which is destined to supplant his own.

Now, from this condition of feeling at Rome, it is apparent not only as a fact that Constantine did not overthrow Paganism, but as a possibility that he could not have overthrown it. In the fierce conflict he would probably have been overthrown himself; and, even for so much as he did accomplish, it was well that he attempted it at a distance from Rome. So profoundly, therefore, are the Fathers in error that, instead of that instant victory which they ascribe to Christianity, even Constantine's revolution was slow and merely local. Nearly five centuries, in fact, it cost, and not three, to Christianise even the entire Mediterranean Empire of Rome; and the premature effort of Constantine ought to be regarded as a mere fluctus decumanus 1 in the continuous

1 "Fluctus decumanus" :-Connected with this term, once so well understood, but now (like all things human) hurrying into oblivion, there was amongst the ancients a fanciful superstition, or, until it is proved such, let us call it courteously a popular creed that wanted the seal and imprimatur of science. Has the reader himself any creed whatsoever, or even opinion, as to waves? Stars, we all know, are of many colours, and of many sizes-crimson, green, azure, orange, and (I believe, but am not certain) violet. As to size, they range all the way from those grandees up and down the sky, apparently plenipotentiaries of the heavens, or (in the Titanic language of Eschylus) λаμπро duvaσra-blazing potentates-all the way down to such as count only amongst the secrets of the telescope, telescopic stars, as imperfectly revealed to the children of man as those children are revealed to them.

advance of the new religion-one of those ambitious billows which sometimes run far ahead of their fellows in a tide steadily gaining ground, but which inevitably recede in the next moment, marking only the strength of that tendency The graduation of stars runs down a Jacob's ladder. Can there be any parallel graduation amongst the billows of old Ocean? The ancients and perhaps it furnishes not the least conspicuous amongst the many evidences attesting their defect of power to observe accurately enough to meet the purposes of natural philosophy-fancied that there was; and, supposing them for the moment right as to the main principle-viz. of a secret law moulding the waves in obedience to some geometric pressure, and expressing itself in some recurrent relation to arithmetic intervals-they must yet have been negligent in excess not to have investigated the relations of the vulgar waves: those, I mean, which apparently escaped the control of the ocean looms. What the ancients held was simply this-that every tenth wave was conspicuously larger than the other nine. But in what respect larger? In height was it, or generally in bulk? Did the favoured wave distribute its superiority of size through the three dimensions of space (consequently the three dimensions of that which fills space)—an arrangement which would greatly disturb the apparent (though not the real) advantage on the scale of comparison between the tenth wave and the other nine? or did this privileged tenth wave accumulate its entire advantage upon the one dimension of altitude? Next, as to the nine subordinate waves, defrauded of their fair proportions by unjust novercal nature, were they all equally defrauded, or was a bias towards favouritism manifested here also? And, if unequally endowed, did this inequality proceed graduatim and continuously, or discontinuously? And, if continuously, how did the scale move upwards? Was it by a geometrical progression through a series of multiples, or arithmetically through a series of constant increments? And the tenth wave-a thing which I was nearly forgetting to demand-being always superior in the scale, was it always equally superior? And, if not, if the superiority were liable to disturbances, did these disturbances follow any known law? or was this law suspected of leaning towards the well-known Cambridge problem-Given the captain's name, and the price of his knee-buckles, to determine the latitude of the ship?

This question about the tenth wave, together with others sent down to us from elder days-such, in particular, as that which respects the venom of the toad-had interested equally myself, the poorest of naturalists, and the late Professor Wilson [written in 1858, four years after Wilson's death.-M.], among the very best. We both admired, in the highest degree, the impassioned eloquence of Sir Thomas Browne in those works which allowed of eloquence, as in his "Religio Medici" and his "Urn-Burial"; but in his works of pure erudition he, the corrector of traditional follies (as in his "Vulgar Errors "), sometimes needs correction himself. We had, in Westmoreland, learned experimentally that Shakspere is right in describing the toad as venomous.