death, determines to cross Europe in quest of its author, though no less a
person than the master of the world--to seek him out in the inner recesses
of his capital city and his private palace--and there to lodge a dagger in
his heart, as the adequate reply to the imperial sentence of proscription
against himself.

Such, amidst his superhuman grandeur and consecrated powers of the Roman
emperor's office, were the extraordinary perils which menaced the
individual, and the peculiar frailties of his condition. Nor is it
possible that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better
illustrated than in this tale of Herodian. Whilst the emperor's mighty
arms were stretched out to arrest some potentate in the heart of Asia, a
poor slave is silently and stealthily creeping round the base of the Alps,
with the purpose of winning his way as a murderer to the imperial
bedchamber; Caesar is watching some mighty rebel of the Orient, at a
distance of two thousand leagues, and he overlooks the dagger which is at
his own heart. In short, all the heights and the depths which belong to
man as aspirers, all the contrasts of glory and meanness, the extremities
of what is his highest and lowest in human possibility,--all met in the
situation of the Roman Caesars, and have combined to make them the most
interesting studies which history has furnished.

This, as a general proposition, will be readily admitted. But meantime, it
is remarkable that no field has been less trodden than the private
memorials of those very Caesars; whilst at the same time it is equally
remarkable, in concurrence with that subject for wonder, that precisely
with the first of the Caesars commences the first page of what in modern
times we understand by anecdotes. Suetonius is the earliest writer in that
department of biography; so far as we know, he may be held first to have
devised it as a mode of history. The six writers, whose sketches are