regarding the fate of his publications; and similarly there are a few cardinal errors which every well-informed biographer of Cæsar is expected to shun. Cæsar must not be drawn as an intemperate conqueror or an ambitious visionary; but when his "clemency," his self-mastery, his inexhaustible energy, and the intensely practical character of his comprehensive genius have been noted, all the subtler traits of personality, all those living touches which distinguish a man from a list of qualities, may be supplied with a large freedom of discretion.
No one has seen this more clearly than Mommsen, or has turned it with more brilliant effect into a crowning theme of passionate panegyric. This character without characteristics, he exclaims, is but a nature without deformity or defect. "As the artist can paint everything except consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in a thousand years he falls in with the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality are combined, is beyond expression." And so the rapture which thus declares itself inarticulate has no resource but an enthusiastic parody of the immortal lover's words, "beati gli occhi chi la videro viva," blessed are the eyes which beheld that perfection in the flesh. Such perfection, it need not be added, would not have overturned the Roman Constitution to gratify
