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72 is hard to imagine life endurable under such a system of police. It affected every order of society except the lowest,—senators, knights, magistrates, and military officers—the busy, the idle—the very young, the very old—men conspicuous for their virtues, and sometimes also for their honourable poverty, and men notorious for their vices, and sometimes for their wealth. A harmless country-gentleman was not more secure in his park than was the occupier of a stately mansion on the Palatine. The informer's bolt was not "the arrow which flies in darkness." There was nothing in the system like the privacy of the Inquisition, of the Vehmgericht, or the Venetian Council of Ten. The emissaries of a Delator did not stick a citation on the pillow of his victim, nor drop it into a lion's mouth—the government post-office. Whatever was done by the Roman informer was done openly. He was not ashamed of his calling: it brought him money and distinction: and he gloried in the means that raised him from obscurity. And yet when no one was secure, men revelled as well as lived under this reign of terror, drank old Falernian and feasted on Lucrine oysters and Umbrian boars as cheerfully as if they were as sure of the morrow as of its sunrise and sunset.

Political eloquence, at least on any grand scale, expired with the commonwealth, for where there are no parties in a State there can be but few occasions for debate. In the law courts, at the city-prætor's tribunal, and when there was an impeachment argued before the senate, there was still a field for wordy war; and if we may trust to the reminiscences of the elder Seneca, to the reports of Tacitus, to Pliny's Letters, to Quintilian, and other writers of the time, many of the Delators