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188 age, though probably moving in different circles of society, they both bear witness to the general profligacy of life in Rome. But there is a difference in their portraits of it. Tacitus, not concealing the depravity of the upper classes, ascribes it to the evil example set by the emperors. Juvenal, in this respect more impartial, shows us that there was, in many a noble house, a Nero or a Domitian. Keeping ever in view his repugnance to the system of government framed by Augustus, the historian concentrates in the Cæsars themselves the vices that were common to the age. But long before there was an emperor there were imperial vices in Rome. But the profligacy, political or personal, of consuls and senators, had not a Tacitus to brand it, and we are left to infer from other writers the enormities of the commonwealth in its later years. The speeches and letters of Cicero alone supply sufficient evidence that the crimes of the emperors had been at least rehearsed by the nobles of his time: that the vices of the palace had been practised in the halls of conscript fathers. The exaggerations of an orator, however, are allowed for by hearers or readers of his speeches; and how often Cicero fluctuated, as his interest at the moment required, in his judgment of public men, is palpable in his letters. He merely used the common privilege of barristers and political writers in every age, to exhibit his friends in the fairest and his foes in the foulest light. Tacitus is a prosecutor of the Cæsars—those at least who are described in the 'Annals'—quite as much as Marcus Tullius was of Catiline or Antonius. But his accusations and insinuations are rarely called in question: and carried away by the force and beauty of his language, by the