veries, than the precious fruits produced by them, still anti- cipated with eagerness a new kind of pleasure and instruction, in accompanying him through the remaining stages of his career. They longed to see how the same great master, who, with such wonderful art, had so often restored the obliterated form of institutions and events by the help of scanty and widely scattered fragments, would work up the rich materials with which the later period supplied him : how he who had shown so vivid a perception of the beauty of the ancient legends, would conceive and reproduce the grandeur of Rome's authentic history : how the same pencil which gave life to the minutest objects that it touched, would portray persons and scenes fitted by their native dignity and importance to rouse even the most torpid imagination : and they desired to hear the same voice which had drawn so many salutary warnings from the struggles of Rome^^s infant liberty, read the great lessons contained in the story of its decay and its extinction. The author himself sympathized with this feeling of his most enlightened admirers: and in the consciousness of powers which had not yet found full room for their noblest kind of exercise, became almost impatient to enter upon the broader and brighter field that lay before him : where he should meet Machiavel and Montesquieu upon their own ground. He expresses this eagerness in his last preface, where after men- tioning the different proportion that his narrative was to bear to his dissertations in the ensuing volume, which was to go down to the second Punic war, he adds : having felt inte- rested and animated by what I had already written I rejoiced, at the time when it seemed that the completion of the re- mainder could not be far off, in the prospect of having here- after to represent and portray men and events."
Under the calamity which overclouded this prospect and disappointed so many wishes, it was still a consolation to learn that some remains of this mighty genius were left be- hind, which might at least enable posterity in some degree to estimate the nature and extent of the loss they had sus- tained in his premature departure. The translators of the last edition were authorized to inform the public, that there had been found among Niebuhr's manuscripts a continuous history from the dictatorship of Publilius, where the original
