however little affecting the praise of a philosophic investigator, would
feel himself called upon to remove a little the taint of the miraculous
and preternatural which adheres to such anecdotes, by entering into the
psychological grounds of their possibility; whether lying in any
peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models,
corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken
separately, and out of their natural connection with their explanatory
causes, are apt rather to startle and revolt the feelings of sober
thinkers. Except, perhaps, in some chapters of Italian history, as, for
example, among the most profligate of the Papal houses, and amongst some
of the Florentine princes, we find hardly any parallel to the atrocities
of Caligula and Nero; nor indeed was Tiberius much (if at all) behind
them, though otherwise so wary and cautious in his conduct. The same tenor
of licentiousness beyond the needs of the individual, the same craving
after the marvellous and the stupendous in guilt, is continually emerging
in succeeding emperors--in Vitellius, in Domitian, in Commodus, in
Caracalla--every where, in short, where it was not overruled by one of two
causes, either by original goodness of nature too powerful to be mastered
by ordinary seductions, (and in some cases removed from their influence by
an early apprenticeship to camps,) or by the terrors of an exemplary ruin
immediately preceding. For such a determinate tendency to the enormous and
the anomalous, sufficient causes must exist. What were they?

In the first place, we may observe that the people of Rome in that age
were generally more corrupt by many degrees than has been usually supposed
possible. The effect of revolutionary times, to relax all modes of moral
obligation, and to unsettle the moral sense, has been well and
philosophically stated by Mr. Coleridge; but that would hardly account for
the utter licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. Looking back to
Republican Rome, and considering the state of public morals but fifty