court of appeal; and it would manifestly be both inconvenient and derogatory to our dignity that members of our body should be at the beck and call of the peers. I see no special reason for excluding the Master of the Rolls; and I would, therefore, leave our door open to him. I would open it to the Judge of the Admiralty, who has been most unwisely excluded. I would open it to other great judicial officers who are now excluded solely because their offices did not exist in 1705, particularly to the two Lords Justices, and the three Vice Chancellors. In this way, we should, I am convinced, greatly facilitate the important and arduous work of law reform; we should raise the character of this House: and I need not say that with the character of this House must rise or fall the estimation in which representative institutions are held throughout the world. But, whether the extensive changes which I have recommended shall be thought desirable or not, I trust that we shall reject the bill of the noble lord. I address myself to the Conservative members on your left hand; and I ask them whether they are prepared to alter, on grounds purely theoretical, a system which has lasted during twenty generations without producing the smallest practical evil. I turn to the Liberal members on this side; and I ask them whether they are prepared to lower the reputation and to impair the efficiency of that branch of the legislature which springs from the people. For myself, Sir, I hope that I am at once a Liberal and a Conservative politician; and, in both characters, I shall give a clear and conscientious vote in favour of the amendment moved by my honorable friend.

LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME.

PREFACE.

THAT What is called the history of the Kings and early Consuls of Rome is to a great extent fabulous, few scholars have, since the time of Beaufort, ventured to deny. It is certain that, more than three hundred and sixty years after the date ordinarily assigned for the foundation of the city, the public records were, with scarcely an exception, destroyed by the Gauls. It is certain that the oldest annals of the commonwealth were compiled more than a century and a half after this destruction of the records. It is certain, therefore, that the great Latin writers of the Augustan age did not possess those materials, without which a trustworthy account of the infancy of the republic could not possibly be framed. Those writers own, indeed, that the chronicles to which they had access were filled with battles that were never fought, and Consuls that were never inaugurated; and we have abundant proof that, in these chronicles, events of the greatest importance, such as the issue of the war with Porsena, and the issue of the war with Brennus, were grossly misrepresented. Under these circumstances a wise man will look with great suspicion on the legend which has come down to us. He will perhaps be inclined to regard the princes who are said to have founded the civil and religious institutions of Rome, the son of Mars, and the husband of Egeria, as mere mythoogical personages, of the same class with Perseus and Ixion. As he draws nearer and nearer to the confines of authentic history, he will become less and less hard of belief. He will admit that the most important parts of the narrative have some foundation in truth. But he will distrust almost all

the details, not only because they seldom rest on any solid evidence, but also because he will constantly detect in them, even when they are within the limits of physical possibility, that peculiar character, more easily understood than defined, which distinguishes the creations of the imagination from the realities of the world in which we live.

The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than any thing else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scævola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defence of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

In the narrative of Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, and gives a charm to the most meagre abridgements of Goldsmith.

Even in the age of Plutarch there were discerning men who rejected the popular account of the foundation of Rome,