This noble prey, on which, like a vulture, he had now fastened, lacerating and tearing up its very vicera, was well nigh wrested from Sylla, just as he was on the point of seizing it with his iron talons. Telesinus, a Samnite chief, had taken the field in support of Cinna. On his march to relieve young Marius, besieged in Præneste, he learned that Sylla, and Pompey were both advancing against him in opposite directions, intending to hem him between their two armies. After examining at one glance, his position and that of each of his adversaries, he resolved, not merely to escape the snare in which Sylla and his presumptuous young lieutenant thought to have entangled him, but by a master movement to crush at once both his advesaries, and the allies, he had unwillingly served! to involve Rome itself and the Romans in one common and promiscuous ruin, avenging Italy and the world of the outrages of these relentless oppressors-nor was the execution of that manœuvre, unworthy of the mind that had formed the plan! He raised his camp in the silence of a dark and stormy night, marching straight on to Rome, which he knew to be unguarded except by its population, no longer warlike as it was when Hannibal, paused before its walls, not that he proved unfaithful to his fortune, but that he saw it defended by an army of citizen soldiers. As the morning dawned, he drew his army in battle order, within ten furlongs of the Colline gate; thence, with a mind elated by the success of the bold manœuvre by which he had foiled two generals of such high reputation; and while his soldiers were resting after their long nocturnal march, he viewed Rome, as the prize of his daring!

The young nobility of the city, as soon as daylight showed them the Samnite army, mounted their horses and boldly charged the foe; but the onset of this undisciplined cavalry was repulsed with terrible slaughter all was now tumult, dread, and wild confusion in Rome; and scenes of deep horror would soon have been acted within the very walls of the Eternal City, but that Sylla, like Telesinus a pupil of Marius, had also learnt from their illustrious master, the value of time in war! It would seem that the antagonist movements of great commanders have something of that fatal precision that marks the gyrations of celestial bodies, the motions of one necessarily determining those of the other. Thus in the present instance, Sylla early discovered that his adversary had broken through the nets with which he thought to have encircled him, and without the loss of an hour he followed his footsteps; sending Balbus, an active officer, at the head of a strong body of cavalry to harrass Telesinus on his march if he should overtake him, and with orders to attack him immediately if he found

him in position before Rome, or in the act of storming it. These orders, Balbus executed with the greatest vigour; scarcely allowing his horses to breathe before he commenced the action, he charged the Samnite infantry with headlong impetuosity! Almost at the same moment Sylla himself appeared in sight, leading on his whole army to the onset! No battle during the civil war, was fought with such determined valour and obstinate tenacity. On the right, Crassus was victorious but the left had already began to give way, when Sylla, rushed into the thickest of the fight. He rode a white horse of wonderful swiftness and vigour; two Samnites, who knew him well, simultaneously hurled their spears at him. He was unaware of the danger; but a tribune, who rode near him, by a sudden blow, made the horse spring forward with a long leap, and the javelins stuck quivering in the ground, having only grazed the hind legs of the horse! It was then, that kissing a small golden image of the Delphic Apollo, which in all hts battles he wore in his bosom, he thus addressed the god with fervent devotion: "O Pythian Apollo, who hast thus conducted the fortunate Cornelius Sylla through so many wars with honour, when thou hast brought him to the threshold of Rome, wilt thou let him fall, thus ingloriously, by the hands of his own fellow citizens?"

Vain his prayer-vain, too, all the efforts of his valour and example—either to stop or rally the panic-struck troops! Then would have closed the career of Sylla, but that Crassus, following up his success, so thoroughly routed both the right wing of the enemy and the centre, where Telesinus commanded in person, that what remained of the Samnite army fled in confusion to Antenma, where the Romans, early on the next morning, began to besiege them. The garrison, despairing of relief, aud trusting to the honour of Sylla, who had promised to spare their lives, surrendered at discretion. These prisoners, to the number of six thousand, he had collected in the Circus; and, having assembled the Senate in the Temple of Bellona, the moment he began his harangue, the troops, as he had ordered, fell sword in hand on these wretched men, and slaughtered them all! The horrible yells of so many victims, the wild uproar of so many voices imploring at once the plighted faith of Sylla and the mercy of their assassins, struck the senators with awe and horror; but Sylla, with unaltered looks, continuing his discourse with unfaltering voice, bade them "attend to what he was saying, and not trouble themselves about what was doing without; for that the noise they heard came only from some malefactors, whom he had ordered to be chastised!"

It was a peculiar trait of Sylla's motley character, that success which, not unfrequently, softens the sternest mind served but to

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stimulate his innate ferocity into madness. Death," Plutarch says, "was the punishment he decreed for any one that should harbour or save a person proscribed-even a father, a son, or a brother! Two talents were the reward of assassination, whether it were a slave that killed his master, or a son his father!"

The wretch, L. S. Catiline, who had slain his own brother, during the civil war to be pardoned that crime, killed Marcus Marius; brought his head to Sylla, as he sat upon his tribunal in the Forum; and then, in irony of the gods, "washed his bloody hands in the lustral water at the door of Apollo's Temple, which was close by !" About the same time, was acted the darker scene of this tragic and calamitous period-Mutilus, one of the proscribed, coming privately and in disguise to the back-door of his wife's house-she refused to admit him, telling him that "he was a forbidden man!" Mutilus stabbed himself, and before he fell, sprinkled his wife's house with his blood!

After having spread the stupor of astonishment and dread both over the people and the Senate, Sylla assumed the Dictatorship, a magistracy which for a period of one hundred and twenty years had been discontinued; compelled the Senate to recognize the legality of all his acts, and to clothe him, by a decree, "with the power of life or death, of confiscating, colonizing, building or demolishing cities; of giving or taking away kingdoms at his pleasure!" On prostitutes, harpers, buffoons, and the vilest of his freedmen, he bestowed the revenues of cities and provinces, and even compelled women of Patrician families to marry some of these wretches! After having anticipated, so to speak, Tiberius in cruelty and lust,-forestalling even the wildest aberrations of a Nero or a Caligula in a speech to the people, in which he recapitulated the instances of his good fortune, he laid no less stress on these, than on those of his conduct and valour; and, as though to insult the understanding of the Romans after having trampled on their freedom, he decreed that in future, he should be called, "Felix" the Fortunate! But in writing to the Grecians, Plutarch says, " he assumed the additional name of Epaphroditus," "the loved of Venus"- -a bitter derision this, both of nature and of love, whose laws and dictates he had alike outraged by his acts, and thwarted in his hideous debaucheries! And yet such was the degradation of the Romans of that period-such too the sway of fame and glory over the female mind-that Valeria, a woman of great beauty and illustrious family, the daughter of Messala, the sister of the orator Hortensius, sitting near Sylla at the Circus, when he presented to the people a show of gladiators, came behind the Dictator, touched him, and plucking off a little of the nap of his purple robe, immediately re

turned to her place! Sylla looked at her, in amazement, as if to inquire the motive of such unwonted familiarity. "Wonder not, Sylla, at what I have done," said Valeria, "I wished to share a little in thy good fortune!" The haughty Dictator pleased at this expression of faith in "his fortune," having satisfied himself as to her family and character, married the noble matron not long after.

But the forbearance of the gods, to speak the language of a great philosopher, could no longer endure the sight of calamities such as Sylla inflicted on the Romans! A malady, the most hideous that can be sent upon man, both to humiliate his pride and torture his frame, came on Sylla-the "Morbus Pediculosus!" The Fortunate, saw his very flesh, as it were, turned into lice, "so that though many persons were employed, both day and night, to clean him, the part taken away was trifling compared with what remained-his baths, his whole attire, his very food were filled with a perpetual flow of vermin and corruption;" and, the Loved of Venus, "though he bathed many times a day, to cleanse and purify his body, could not free himself from the pollution of the most obscene of insects!" And yet, under the very hand of Providence, Sylla bent not in suppliant repentance of his crimes; for, on the very day before he died, "having been informed, that the quæstor Granius would not pay what he owed him, but waited for his death to avoid paying it, he had him dragged before him, by his slaves, and strangled in his presence." This was the last scene of the long and bloody drama of Sylla's life. The violence with which he spoke, on that occasion, caused the breaking of a blood vessel; his strength now failed fast. and after he had passed the night in extreme agony, he expired.

We cannot explain by what a train of reasoning Montesquieu, from the history of Sylla's life, such as ancient historians, rather partial than hostile to his fame, have written it, arrived at the conclusion he has expressed in the celebrated dialogue between Sylla and a Greek Sophist that "through his whole career, the Dictator had constantly in view the restoring, to Rome, her free institutions, after he had freed them from tribunitial encroachments." Was it to retemper the fallen energies of the Roman people that Sylla let loose on the citizens his licentious soldiery, giving up a prey to their avarice, the wealth of the enemies he had proscribed?

His murder of Granius, of itself, shows sufficiently that the pretended abdication of his Dictatorship, was but a farce played for his own amusement before the Roman people! a Questor seized by slaves, and strangled by them! who but a Dictator could order this, who but such an absolute Magistrate find the executors of such an

act? Was it to wrest power from the hands of proletaries, and confide it into the keeping of the opulent and high-born, that the Dictator doomed the inhabitants of Præneste to a general slaughter? That he levelled to the ground, as if swept by some dire earthquake, all the cities of the Samnites? And, above all, we ask, was it to reestablish the early purity of Roman manners, that sitting as a Magistrate in the Forum, surrounded by astrologers, pathics, and courtezans, he himself sold at public auction the estates of those Romans whom he had proscribed, or slain? There was in the retaliatory revenge of Marius something of the sudden rage of the provoked lion, which relents as soon as it has conquered. But Sylla, like the tiger, in the wantonness of mirthful cruelty, played with his prey!

The arts, letters; nay poetry, which he loved, and had studied with no ordinary success, had failed to soften or to purify as is their wont, his savage nature. His learning seemed as if it pandered to his evil genius, bringing in aid of its fiendish propensities, bitter allusions, desolating sarcasms drawn from ancient lore, to point the epigrams with which he delighted to lacerate the sensibility, at the same time that the executioner tortured the body, of his victim. But Sylla, contends his apologists, magnanimously abdicated, of his own accord, the supreme power that he might have retained through life-a noble selfdenial this, which should disarm history of some of its severity in the examination of the Dictator's acts! It is not true that he abdicated absolute power; he only allowed the senate and the people to confer the title of Consuls upon citizens who exercised no real authority in the state. To no one did he entrust the command of an army. Mithridates was suffered to repair, undisturbed and unchecked, the disasters of his recent defeats. The Gauls were still independent and dreaded; while another power of sudden growth and strength, boded long and difficult wars in the East!

Sylla, having crushed Marius, allowed no rival ambition to rise to power and fame. Besides, the veteran legions that had conquered in Chæronea, at Orcchomenes, and brought their great leader triumphant from Pontus to Rome, were unwilling to begin another war, under any other chief, but Sylla. He had promised them, land, gold, and repose; and when they claimed these at his hands, he distributed to them the inheritance of one hundred proscribed or slaughtered Roman citizens! These military colonists were quartered, as it were, within hearing of the Dictator's voice, had he called for the aid of their swords. Sylla, when he broke the golden palm, the symbol of the dictatorship, did not lay aside the shield he bore when he scaled the walls of Athens, nor throw away the spear that had subdued Mithridates, Carbo,