dowery of civic purity, if to him she first unloosed her maiden zone, then
be it affirmed boldly--that she reserved her greatest favors for the
noblest of her wooers, and we may plead the justification of Falconbridge
for his mother's trangression with the lion-hearted king--such a sin was
self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then, by that consummation, he
caused her to fulfill the functions of her nature; he compelled her to
exchange the imperfect and inchoate condition of a mere _faemina_ for the
perfections of a _mulier_. And, metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost
no liberties by the mighty Julius. That which in tendency, and by the
spirit of her institutions--that which, by her very corruptions and abuses
co-operating with her laws, Rome promised and involved in the germ--even
that, and nothing less or different, did Rome unfold and accomplish under
this Julian violence. The rape [if such it were] of Caesar, her final
Romulus, completed for Rome that which the rape under Romulus, her
earliest Caesar, had prosperously begun. And thus by one godlike man was a
nation-city matured; and from the everlasting and nameless [Footnote:
"_Nameless city_."--The true name of Rome it was a point of religion to
conceal; and, in fact, it was never revealed.] city was a man produced--
capable of taming her indomitable nature, and of forcing her to immolate
her wild virginity to the state best fitted for the destined "Mother of
empires." Peace, then, rhetoricians, false threnodists of false liberty!
hollow chanters over the ashes of a hollow republic! Without Caesar, we
affirm a thousand times that there would have been no perfect Rome; and,
but for Rome, there could have been no such man as Caesar.

Both then were immortal; each worthy of each. And the _Cui viget nihil
simile aut secundum_ of the poet, was as true of one as of the other.
For, if by comparison with Rome other cities were but villages, with even
more propriety it may be asserted, that after the Roman Caesars all modern
kings, kesars, or emperors, are mere phantoms of royalty. The Caesar of