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the moderate tone in which it is expressed. He does not consider Atticus as setting a wholesome or a laudable example to good citizens; but he denies him to have been, as others have maintained, an utterly selfish man. His great humanity to all his acquaintances, his active services to all his friends, redeem his name in great measure from such an imputation. Selfish he may have been by temper and on system; but his care for his own interest cost no man position, good name, or life, and, compared with the selfishness of Pompeius and Cæsar, or with the personal vanity of Cicero, his neutrality almost assumes the dignity of a virtue Of his memorable friendship he reaped a full and well-merited recompense -a name that posterity will not let die. Justly has Seneca observed, and were there a statue of Pomponius Atticus his words would meetly be inscribed on its pedestal:

might reasonably, at such a period, say to himself that there was neither cause nor party worth fighting for-that honour could only be purchased by corruption, and probably also by crime. But this, according to M. Gaston Boissier, was not the view taken by Atticus. He was ambitious, but it was of wealth, and not of perilous honours. Once a rich man, distinction would follow, but it must be such distinction as neither bludgeons nor swords would purchase. Accordingly, Atticus invested his patrimony in the rich pastures of Epirus, and spent his rents in training troops of gladiators, whom he let out for the arena, or in educating slaves as copyists, bookbinders, and decorators, whose wages brought in to their owner a considerable income. Neither did he disdain the less dignified character of a money-lender, in which line of business he was remarkably strict in exacting his dues. Absent from Rome for twenty years, he returned to it a great capitalist, unconnected with any party in the State, and not expected to mix himself in any question or faction of the day. Yet, though he stood thus aloof from the A separate, but shorter, chapter is asvortex of politics, he became intimate with signed to another friend and correspondent every political leader. He passed from the of Cicero - Cælius. And the selection is house of Crassus to that of Pompeius, from judicious, for he was a type of the creature the house of Cicero to that of Clodius, from engendered by revolutions. He would have Bibulus to Cæsar, and was welcomed by been in Paris in 1789 what he was in Rome them all with impartial respect. His own eighteen centuries earlier. With good abiltable resembled that of Sir Joshua Rey-ities, with great personal gifts, without any nolds; the fare was simple, the attendants were few, but the guests were the noblest and the most conspicuous men of the age. To Atticus alone it was permitted to be the friend of all men, without incurring the anger of any; nay, to such an extent was his exemption carried, that he became the friend of Octavius, although only a few months earlier he had clasped the hands of Brutus and Cassius.

M. Boissier shows that Atticus, notwithstanding these privileges as a neutral in a time of fierce and infinite division, was at heart a republican of the old stamp, and made no secret of his aversion to the designs of Cæsar. Possibly his dislike or alarm proceeded rather from his knowledge of Cæsar's followers than from personal hostility to the great and humane Dictator himself. One who had so much to lose as he had might well distrust ruffians like Milo, and prodigals like Cælius and Dolabella. Neither could the refined and philosophical Atticus find much pleasure in the conversation of rude and illiterate tribunes of the legions. M. Boissier's view of this remarkable character is the more likely to be accepted from

"Nomen Attici perire Ciceronis epistolæ non sinunt; nihil illi profuisset gener Agrippa, et Tiberius progener, et Drusus Cæsar pronepos; inter tam magna nomina taceretur, nisi Cicero illum applicuisset."

fixed principles moral or political, Cælius
was one of the men who follow on the heels
of partisan leaders, and bring disgrace alike
on them and their cause.
In earlier and
better days he would have stood among the
young Claudii and Fabii whose insolent de-
meanour towards the Commons of Rome
was, even more than direct oppression, the
cause of secession from the city and of san-
guinary tumult in its streets. In his own
day he belonged to the profligate coterie of
which Catullus and Calvus were the poets,
and Clodius and Antonius the informing
spirits.

It is not to be expected that Cicero's early reputation will ever revive; that there will ever again be a Ciceronian sect or worship; that he will ever again be extolled above Cæsar; or that a Sir William Jones will peruse annually his Opera Omnia, or refuse Octavius his imperial title becausehe was consenting to Cicero's murder. Yet, although he has ceased to be an idol of the learned and the companion of statesmen in their closets, it does not follow that he was "a slight unmeritable man," much less that he was the low-minded intriguer, the desul

tor partium, the political turncoat, the cow-ly with reason, to have settled the sites of ard or the braggart of some recent books. Ai, Nob,. Gath, Hazor, Hazar-Enan, and We cannot, however, here enter upon his some other places hitherto doubtful or undefence, and indeed, to readers of the vol- discovered. But the chief value of the volume before us, it is unnecessary to do so. ume is that part of it which describes jourM. Gaston Boissier is no Tulli fuutor ineptus. neys through districts in which few travelHe does not deny that Cicero was some- lers since the time of Burckhardt had pretimes weak, always irritable and vain, and ceded him-Bashan and the Eastern Wiloccasionally mistaken, and indeed mischiev- derness, and the north border of the Holy ous, in his public conduct. But, admitting Land. We may add, on the testimony of so much, he also shows that at Rome in any one of the (almost equally few) travellers age, and more especially in a revolutionary who have hitherto followed his steps, that era, a novus homo, a man without a train of his accuracy may be entirely depended on, clients and without family connection, could The great want is that of a map. not rise to high place except at some extraordinary crisis, and by singular ability and energy alone. Cicero had rendered himself necessary to the oligarchy, but the necessity did not make him strong. He tried to compensate for the want of a comitatus, first by a temporary union of the Senate and the Knights, and afterwards by playing off the heads of factions against each other. But in each case he leaned upon a rush; in each he became the sport of those in whom he put trust; and we should perhaps rather admire the pertinacity with which he clung to his position, than condemn the arts or intrigues by which he balanced himself upon it. The difficulties of that position are clearly and succinctly shown by M. Boissier in the chapter entitled "César et Cicéron."

From the Saturday Review.
BASHAN AND SYRIA.*

"THE Giant Cities of Bashan and Syria's Holy Places" is magniloquent enough to presage a very washy performance. We only beg that no one into whose hands this little volume may fall will be deterred from reading it by its title. In the compass of about 350 pages of excellent type, on thick creamy paper, and illustrated by a few striking engravings from photographs, Mr. Porter has given a thoroughly satisfactory account of Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, the valley of the Jordan from its sources, Philistia and the plain of Sharon, Galilee, and Esdraelon. In all these, however, he is in some degree a compiler, keeping aloof as much as may be from the paths and dis

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We must premise that there are a few mistakes about the book, which, however pardonable in works of slight merit or transitory interest, Mr Porter should set to work seriously to correct, simply because his is a book which deserves to last. It is not expedient, for instance, to call the ruins of a Roman theatre, whenever they occur, a "rustic opera;' nor to talk about the olives in Gethsemane forming" an arbour,” and elsewhere an "oratory," "" for Jesus;" nor to speak of the "Tyropean (sic) valley' as though the former word were a sort of. adjective, like European. Certain ecstatics, again, might be spared which occur at intervals throughout, but perhaps reach their bathos in sentences like the following (he is surveying the southern half of Zion) :

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Besides the odd taste of this kind of ebul

lition, one gets a notion of the pursuit of prophecy under difficulties, which is most unfortunate in a volume which gives more fulfilled than can be found perhaps in any instances of definite prophecies distinctly other. The Holy Land, in truth, in its very aspect, in the salutations and even the meals of the inhabitants, authenticates at every turn and (as one may say) identifies the Bible and especially its minuter touchescoveries of others, and filling in excellent in a way that nothing else can; and the details everywhere, and these from original tion of an eye-witness may safely leave the travel-book that puts one fairly in the posiexploration. He claims, e. g., and apparent-reader to verify the prophecies for himself

*The Giant Cities of Bashan, and Syria's Holy Places. By the Rev. J. L. Porter, A. M., Author of "Five Years in Damascus," "Murray's Hand-book

for Syria and Palestine," "The Pentateuch and the Gospels," &c. London: T. Nelson & Sons. 1865.

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a sort of

There is also here and there something
even less pleasant than ecstacies-
writing which we can only designate as
When we are told,
Irish pseudo-poetics.

"The poor Jew may now truly exclaim, as he looks down on his squalid dwelling on the brow of Zion

Our temple hath not left one stone,
And mockery sits on Salem's throne"

one is apt to think he might easily find
more profitable occupation then talking
questionable grammar in unquestionable
doggrel; but what on earth is one to think
when a description of Gethsemane ends as
follows?

Who can thy deep wonders see,
Wonderful Gethsemane !
There my God bare all my guilt;

This through grace can be believed;
But the horrors which he felt

Are too vast to be conceived.
None can penetrate through thee,
Doleful, dark Gethsemane !

This (whoever may have been its author) we take to be unequalled of its kind. But we venture to believe that we express the feeling of nine readers out of ten when we request the omission, in all future editions, of extravagances like the above, of endeavours (which are far too frequent) to rewrite Scripture narratives with the help of sensational superlatives, and of Anglo-Irish fine writing in general. Finally, we cannot suppress a little surprise that a writer who knocks over Dr. Colenso's mares'-nests unscrupulously whenever they come across him (and some of them - as e.g. the one about the over-populousness of the Promised Land- admirably) should have gravely told us that the angel of death who destroyed Sennacherib's army was very possibly a simoom-for no apparent reason except that Mr. Porter fell in with one and found it very disagreeable — and should have indulged in remarks about "the sins which led to David's ill-assorted and badly-trained family" as glibly as Ewald or the last new philosopher. Mr. Porter's heroics and spasmodics are only excusable on the supposition that they are intended for a class of readers, not yet wholly extinct, who rejoice in Watts's Divine and Moral Songs, and get their notions of the world from the Record. And now we have done with fault-finding. If we had not a real belief that the volume is of far more value than perhaps any other of its size on the subject of which it treats, we should not have troubled ourselves to inflict these fidelia vulnera amantis.

In its matter the book is good throughout. About the most hard-worked routes and familiar places Mr. Porter still finds something

to say that nobody has
we have observed, its
its account of Bashan.

said before; but, as especial value lies in Not that this is en

tirely new (though in part it is) to the readers of his former, volumes; but not one traveller in a hundred goes eastward of the three days' tour in Moab or an excursion Jordan valley, except, perhaps, for two or from Beyrout to Damascus, and therefore the stay-at-home reader knows nothing of the intervening district but what his remembrances of his school-maps tell him — namely, that a broad white space of nobody knows how many hundreds of miles of desert runs all the way to the Euphrates. We believe that very many persons will be much surprised to learn that from the borders of Syria to the Euphrates is only about as far as from London to York, and that the country east of the Jordan is, for miles and miles, as rich grazing land as can be desired.

it is almost uninhabited, save here and there Its two great peculiarities are, first, that by a few Druse tribes who live in perpetual terror of Bedouin raids; and next, the singular good fortune which has preserved its ruins almost unchanged for more than 3,000 years. Bashan is probably more crowded with ruins, and those ruins of large and populous towns, than any other district in the world. The" sixty great cities" (Deut. iii. 4, 5, 14) of one of its little districts (Argob, the Roman Trachonitis, some thirty miles by twenty, and the most rocky part of the country) are all there still. You can hardly ascend a hill without seeing a dozen or two at a view. Here and there, as at Kufr, the stone gates, about ten feet high, remain in their places to this day. Everywhere the eye meets with Roman and Saracenic superstructures, and not unfrequently with a series of inscriptions that make a sort of stone chronology among them, telling how, on foundations visibly older than those of Solomon's temple, so-and-so the Roman built a temple to Jupiter, which three or four hundred years afterwards Bishop Gregorius converted into a church, and which has now been for many centuries a ruined mosque. The roads to this day are Roman, almost everywhere; but the houses are of far earlier date, and are as habitable at this moment as when they were deserted by their possessors. are deserted, but they are in no sense ruinThey ed:

shan are perfect, as if only finished yesterday. Many of the houses in the ancient cities of BaThe walls are sound, the roofs unbroken, the

ces.

doors and even the window-shutters in their pla- | rather in Mr. Robson's, "had it not been
Let not my readers think that I am tran- for Abd-el-Kader, and a few others, the
scribing a passage from the Arabian Nights. slaughter would have been much greater
"But how," you ask me, "can we account for than it was." And, except that they were
the preservation of ordinary dwellings in a land
of ruins? If one of our modern English cities personally kind to himself, we cannot un-
were deserted for a millennium, there would derstand his somewhat extravagant lauda-
scarcely be a fragment of a wall standing." The tion of the Druses. One gets a slight im-
reply is easy enough. The houses of Bashan pression of one-sidedness in these parts of
are not ordinary houses. Their walls are from the narrative for which there may be rea-
five to eight feet thick, built of large squared sons with which the author has not made us
blocks of basalt; the roofs are formed of slabs acquainted. But this is a matter, after all,
of the same material, hewn like planks, and on which Mr. Porter must be a better judge
reaching from wall to wall; the very doors and than most other persons can be. Of the
window-shutters are of stone, hung upon piv-value of the book altogether there can be
ots projecting above and below. Some of these

ancient cities have from two to five hundred no two opinions.
houses still perfect, but not a man to dwell in
them. On one occasion, from the battlements
of the castle of Salcah, I counted some thirty
towns and villages dotting the surface of the
vast plain, many of them almost as perfect as
when they were built, and yet for more than
five centuries there has not been a single inhab-

itant in one of them.

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When we find, one after another, great stone cities, walled and unwalled, with stone gates, and so crowded together that it becomes almost a matter of wonder how all the people could have lived in so small a place; when we see houses built of such huge and massive stones that no force which can be brought against them in that country could ever batter them down; when we find rooms in these houses so large and lofty that many of them would be considered fine rooms in a palace in Europe; and, lastly, when we find some of these towns bearing the very names which cities in that very country bore before the Israelites came out of Egypt, I think we cannot help feeling the strongest conviction that we have before us the cities of the Rephaim of which we read in the Book of Deuteronomy.

We are obliged to leave unnoticed all that Mr. Porter says of the northern border of the Promised Land; and also a curious account of the massacres of 1860 at Damascus and in the Lebanon, drawn from the narratives of eye-witnesses - Mr. Graham, Dr. Meshakah, and Mr. Robson. His estimate of the Arabs, wherever he falls in with them, is a good deal different from that of Lady Duff Gordon; and perhaps what he heard of their doings in Damascus, and saw of them in Bashan, entitles his judgment to considerable weight. Still we cannot forget that, in his own words, or

From the Spectator, 25 Nov. GOVENOR EYRE'S DESPATCH. Ir is but natural that the proceedings in Jamaica should excite violent party feeling in this country, nor do we complain that ceedings taken to suppress the rebellion the criticisms we have passed upon the prohave been somewhat vehemently criticized in their turn. We are told on many sides that we have apologized for the mob who fired the Court House at Morant Bay. Is that because we took special care to approve all who were known to be concerned in it? cordially the execution of Paul Bogle and We are assured that it is " part of the programme" of our journal to take the side we have taken, and that". "justice may strive in vain to change its tone," an accusation which, if it means anything, means, we suppose, that it is part of our programme to plead for those who appear to have suffered injustice, for those who have many powerful enemies and few powerful friends, when they need it, an accusation which we have no desire to deny. But assuredly we care nothing for the negro quâ negro. We would say nothing to palliate a negro's guilt in any crime or brutality he has committed. The only offence of which ås far as we know we have ever been guilty in this respect is a humble desire to see black men dealt with exactly as white men of the same moral and mental characteristics would be dealt with, so much, and no more. What we desire to see in Jamaica, what we are indignant at not seeing, is the same spirit in dealing with rebellion which would be shown if the rebels were Fenians, instead of negroes. We have a faint impression that if Colonel Hobbs had kept "an intelligent little valet" of Mr. Stephens's close to his saddle bow, with a pistol to his head, and had ordered him, under that compul

sion, to point out the various responsible | measures. Officers, instructed to prevent officers of the Fenian organization in a at any cost the massacre of the whole white crowd of Irishmen, and had hanged or shot population, could not be expected not to all so pointed out the next day, the Irish forestall, even at the cost of some innocent 'members, not to say the English members, lives, anything like menacing movements of the House of Commons, could have made of negro troops. But then what is the use a good deal of fuss about that summary pro- of sending out Englishmen unconnected ceeding. We are inclined to suppose that with our colonies to rule them at all, if they had the O'Donoghue been seized in London cannot keep their heads sufficiently above for writing seditious letters and making se- the prevalent excitement to judge what is ditious speeches, tried hastily by court-mar- an emergency justifying extreme measures, tial in Dublin, and hanged within forty-eight and what is not? We might as well leave hours, we should have scarcely heard a pan- Jamaica to be governed by a leading plantegyric on Lord Wodehouse's promptitude, er, as send out a brave and enterprising or had articles in the Times heartily approv- Englishman who will accept all that the ing the energy and successful severity of white inhabitants around him say of the nethe Lord-Lieutenant. The true suppressed cessity of desperate measures on any emerpremise at the bottom of all these indignant gency. The greatness of Lord Canning's protests against our very moderate line of administration in India was that he stood thought, is the assumption that a hundred like a rock between the natives and the setnegroes' lives are of less value than one tlers when an enormous native army had white life; that even the duty of securing or- mutinied. In this case there was no native dinary civil justice to a light mulatto like army to mutiny. The danger was immeasMr. Gordon, who takes part with negroes, urably less in every respect, and the power cannot weigh for a moment in the scale of the Government in relation to that danagainst even a risk of danger to pure Eng- ger immeasurably greater. What does Govlishmen, that, in short, proceedings which ernor Eyre - who, as we have shown elsewould be thought utterly savage in Ireland where, is not only a brave man, but a man are praiseworthy in Jamaica. That women, almost unrivalled on the earth for courage, without arms or a chance of arms, should in some sense both moral and physical be hanged by court-martial for admitting say in his despatch to justify the astounding that they had been present at meetings at measures, the responsibility of all of which, which oaths of secrecy were enforced, is down to the campaign of Colonel Hobbs surely a somewhat startling form of British and the court-martialing of Mr. Gordon, he justice. Not even the panic of imminent deliberately and very honourably assumes? universal rebellion would be now held to As far as we can judge, absolutely nothing. palliate such a proceeding in Ireland. In Of course he shows enough to justify instant Jamaica, however, the laws of justice and capital punishment for all engaged in the mercy are of course widely different. Morant Bay murders. No one that we know of has ever disputed the justice and wisdom of prompt severity with respect to those who had any share in that act. what does Mr. Eyre show to justify the indiscriminate slaughter of the other so-called rebels'? Nothing stronger than the actual possession of arms by some of these rebels, not even the use of them, still less any organized use of them, least of all any efficient use of them. "No stand," writes Mr. Eyre, " has ever been made against the troops, and though we are not only in complete military occupation of, but have traversed with troops, all the disturbed districts, not a single casualty has befallen one of our soldiers or sailors, and they are all in good health." Even Colonel Hobbs, in that great night march, on the exciting nature of which he was so eloquent, had no more formidable adversary than the storm; and the rebels whom he captured, and executed on the evidence elicited by a pistol pointed at the head of the "intelligent little valet" of

But, it is said, there was the pressing fear of a universal massacre in Jamaica, to justify this attempt to paralyze the vast numerical majority of the population by striking a sudden terror into them. Was there? That is the only point on which we were quite uncertain when we wrote last. Had it been so, it does not seem to us that it could have justified, though it might partially have palliated, proceedings such as the letting loose of the Maroons on the black population, the distinguished campaign of Colonel Hobbs, and the court-martialing of Mr. Gordon, a member of the Legislative Assembly, not even accused of any part in the Morant Bay massacre, who had surrendered himself to justice, but doubtless every one would have felt that it did palliate the injustice, and, so far as there was cruelty, the cruelty of such proceedings. A Governor seriously fearing, on good grounds, that the colony might be wrested from his grasp by insurrection, ought not to be very particular in his

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