support. This," he adds, "is an admitted truth."

Again, the attentive reader can hardly fail to see that, in the struggle
between Pompey and Cæsar, Cæsar represented the popular as Pompey did
the aristocratical party, and that Pompey's triumph would have been
attended, as Cicero clearly saw, by the domination of an aristocracy in
the shape most oppressive and intolerable. The government of Rome, after
several desperate struggles, had degenerated into the most corrupt
oligarchy, in which all the eloquence of Cicero was unable to kindle the
faintest gleam of public virtue. Owing to the success of Cæsar, the
civilized world exchanged the dominion of several tyrants for that of
one, and the opposition to his design was the resistance of the few to
the many.

Or we may take another view of the subject. By freedom do we mean the
absence of all restraint in private life, the non-interference by the
state in the details of ordinary intercourse? According to such a view,
the old government of Venice and the present government of Austria,
where debauchery is more than tolerated, would be freer than the Puritan
commonwealths in North America, where dramatic representations were
prohibited as impious, and death was the legal punishment of
fornication.

These are specimens of the difficulties by which we are beset, when we
endeavour to obtain an exact and faithful image from the troubled medium
through which human affairs are reflected to us. Dr Arnold dwells on
this point with his usual felicity of language and illustration.

"This inattention to altered circumstances, which would make us
be Guelfs in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, because