Coruncanius was consul with P. Lævinus in the year when Pyrrhus came into Italy, and was named dictator more than thirty years afterwards for the purpose of holding the comitia. He left no writings behind him, but was accustomed to the very latest period of his life to give answers on points of law to all that chose to consult him; and his reputation was so high that he was the first plebeian. who was ever appointed to the dignity of pontifex maximus. The Ogulnii also appear to have been a family distinguished for knowledge and accomplishments. Two brothers of this name were, as we have seen, the authors of the law which threw open the offices of augur and pontifex to the commons, and afterwards in their ædileship they ornamented the city with several works of art; and one of them, besides his embassy to Epidaurus, already noticed, was sent as one of three ambassadors to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, soon after the retreat of Pyrrhus from Italy.—History of Rome.

4. Hannibal and the Power of Rome.

TWICE in history has there been witnessed the struggle of the highest individual genius against the resources and institutions of a great nation; and in both cases the nation has been victorious. For seventeen years Hannibal strove against Rome; for sixteen years Napoleon Buonaparte strove against England: the efforts of the first ended in Zama, those of the second in Waterloo.

True it is, as Polybius has said, that Hannibal was supported by the zealous exertions of Carthage; and the strength of the opposition to his policy has been very possibly exaggerated by the Roman writers. But the zeal of his country in the contest, as Polybius himself remarks in another place,

was itself the work of his family. Never did great men more show themselves the living spirit of a nation than Hamilcar, and Hasdrubal, and Hannibal, during a period of nearly fifty years, approved themselves to be to Carthage. It is not then merely through our ignorance of the internal state of Carthage, that Hannibal stands so prominent in all our conceptions of the second Punic war: he was really its moving and directing power; and the energy of his country was but a light reflected from his own. History therefore gathers itself into his single person: in that vast tempest, which from north and south, from the west and the east, broke upon Italy, we see nothing but Hannibal.

But if Hannibal's genius may be likened to the Homeric god, who in his hatred of the Trojans rises from the deep to rally the fainting Greeks and to lead them against the enemy, so the calm courage with which Hector met his more than human adversary in his country's cause is no unworthy image of the unyielding magnanimity displayed by the aristocracy of Rome. As Hannibal utterly eclipses Carthage, so on the contrary Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit, and wisdom, and power of Rome. The senate which voted its thanks to its political enemy Varro, after his disastrous defeat, 'because he had not despaired of the Commonwealth,' and which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than the conqueror of Zama. This we should the more carefully bear in mind, because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than national; and as no single Roman will bear comparison with Hannibal, we are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the victory was

awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the contrary, never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind, that Hannibal should be conquered: his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can in one generation effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body, to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life: when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must in the course of nature have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe.-History of Rome.

5. Scipio.

A MIND like Scipio's, working its way under the peculiar influences of his time and country, cannot but move irregularly; it cannot but be full of contradictions. Two hundred years later, the mind of the dictator Cæsar acquiesced contentedly in Epicureanism: he retained no more of enthusiasm than was inseparable from the intensity

of his intellectual power and the fervour of his courage, even amidst his utter moral degradation. But Scipio could not be like Cæsar. His mind rose above the state of things around him; his spirit was solitary and kingly; he was cramped by living among those as his equals, whom he felt fitted to guide as from some higher sphere; and he retired at last to Liternum to breathe freely, to enjoy the simplicity of childhood, since he could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero king. So far he stood apart from his countrymen, admired, reverenced, but not loved. But he could not shake off all the influences of his time; the virtue, public and private, which still existed at Rome, the reverence paid by the wisest and best men to the religion of their fathers, were elements too congenial to his nature, not to retain their hold on it: they cherished that nobleness of soul in him, and that faith in the invisible and divine, which two centuries of growing unbelief rendered almost impossible in the days of Cæsar. Yet how strange must the conflict be, when faith is combined with the highest intellectual power, and its appointed object is no better than Paganism! Longing to believe, yet repelled by palpable falsehood, crossed inevitably with snatches of unbelief, in which hypocrisy is ever close at the door, it breaks out desperately, as it may seem, into the region of dreams and visions, and mysterious communings with the invisible, as if longing to find that food in its own creations, which no outward objective truth offers to it. The proportions of belief and unbelief in the human mind in such cases, no human judgment can determine: they are the wonders of history; characters inevitably misrepresented by the vulgar, and viewed even by those who in some sense have the key to them as a mystery, not fully to be comprehended, and still less explained to others. The genius

which conceived the incomprehensible character of Hamlet, would alone be able to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio or of Cromwell.-History of Rome.

6. The Treasures of History.

ENOUGH has been said, I think, to show that history contains no mean treasures: that as being the biography of a nation, it partakes of the richness and variety of those elements which make up a nation's life. Whatever there is of greatness in the final cause of all human thought and action, God's glory and man's perfection, that is the measure of the greatness of history. Whatever there is of variety and intense interest in human nature,—in its elevation, whether proud as by nature or sanctified as by God's grace; in its suffering, whether blessed or unblessed, a martyrdom or a judgment; in its strange reverses, in its varied adventures, in its yet more varied powers, its courage and its patience, its genius and its wisdom, its justice and its love, that also is the measure of the interest and variety of history. The treasures indeed are ample; but we may more reasonably fear whether we may have strength and skill to win them.-Inaugural Lecture on the Study of Modern History, 1841.