filled by the breath of civil commotion,--thou, that, besides the wreck of
thy soldiery perishing on either side, didst bewail, amongst thy
spectacles of domestic woe, the luminaries of thy senate extinguished, the
heads of thy consuls fixed upon a halberd, weeping for ages over thy self-
slaughtered Catos, thy headless Ciceros (_truncosque Cicerones_), and
unburied Pompeys;--to whom the party madness of thy own children had
wrought in every age heavier woe than the Carthaginian thundering at thy
gates, or the Gaul admitted within thy walls; on whom OEmathia, more fatal
than the day of Allia,--Collina, more dismal than Cannae,--had inflicted
such deep memorials of wounds, that, from bitter experience of thy own
valor, no enemy was to thee so formidable as thyself;--thou, Rome! didst
now for the first time behold a civil war issuing in a hallowed
prosperity, a soldiery appeased, recovered Italy, and for thyself liberty
established. Now first in thy long annals thou didst rest from a civil war
in such a peace, that righteously, and with maternal tenderness, thou
mightst claim for it the honors of a civic triumph."]

--"God and his Son except,
Created thing nought valued she nor shunned."

That the possessor and wielder of such enormous power--power alike
admirable for its extent, for its intensity, and for its consecration from
all counterforces which could restrain it, or endanger it--should be
regarded as sharing in the attributes of supernatural beings, is no more
than might naturally be expected. All other known power in human hands has
either been extensive, but wanting in intensity--or intense, but wanting
in extent--or, thirdly, liable to permanent control and hazard from some
antagonist power commensurate with itself. But the Roman power, in its
centuries of grandeur, involved every mode of strength, with absolute
immunity from all kinds and degrees of weakness. It ought not, therefore,