Cassius, the stubborn and thoughtful patriot, with his heart of iron, had, you remember, an itching palm.
Yet, what a blow to all the hopes and dreams of a world was the overthrow of the free party after the death of Caesar! What generations of freemen fell at Philippi! In England, perhaps, we may have ultimately the same struggle; in France, too (perhaps a larger stage, with far more inflammable actors), we already perceive the same war of elements which shook Rome to her centre, which finally replaced the generous Julius with the hypocritical Augustus, which destroyed the colossal patricians to make way for the glittering dwarfs of a court, and cheated the people out of the substance with the shadow of liberty.

How it may end in the modern world, who shall say?
But while a nation has already a fair degree of constitutional freedom, I believe no struggle so perilous and awful as that between the aristocratic and the democratic principle.
A people against a despot--_that_ contest requires no prophet; but the change from an aristocratic to a democratic commonwealth is indeed the wide, unbounded prospect upon which rest shadows, clouds, and darkness.
If it fail--for centuries is the dial-hand of Time put back; if it succeed--" Maltravers paused.
"And if it succeed ?" said Valerie.
"Why, then, man will have colonised Utopia!" replied Maltravers.
"But at least, in modern Europe," he continued, "there will be fair room for the experiment.

For we have not that curse of slavery which, more than all else, vitiated every system of the ancients, and kept the rich and the poor alternately at war; and we have a press, which is not only the safety-valve of the passions of every party, but the great note-book of the experiments of every hour--the homely, the invaluable ledger of losses and of gains.

No; the people who keep that tablet well, never can be bankrupt.

And the society of those old Romans; their daily passions--occupations--humours!--why, the satire of Horace is the glass of our own follies! We may fancy his easy pages written in the Chaussee d'Antin, or Mayfair; but there was one thing that will ever keep the ancient world dissimilar from the modern." "And what is that ?" "The ancients knew not that delicacy in the affections which characterises the descendants of the Goths," said Maltravers, and his voice slightly trembled; "they gave up to the monopoly of the senses what ought to have had an equal share in the reason and the imagination.
Their love was a beautiful and wanton butterfly; but not the butterfly which is the emblem of the soul." Valerie sighed.