deemed quite allowable. The smooth barbarian considered; that a license of
the first sort offended against decorum, whilst the other violated only
the sanctities of the human heart, and the whole sexual character of
women. It is our opinion, that to the brutalizing effect of these
exhibitions we are to ascribe not only the early extinction of the Roman
drama, but generally the inferiority of Rome to Greece in every department
of the fine arts. The fine temper of Roman sensibility, which no culture
could have brought to the level of the Grecian, was thus dulled for
_every_ application.] as much as men, and children intermingled with
both, looked on with leisurely indifference, with anxious expectation, or
with rapturous delight, whilst below them were passing the direct
sufferings of humanity, and not seldom its dying pangs, it was impossible
to expect a result different from that which did in fact take place,--
universal hardness of heart, obdurate depravity, and a twofold degradation
of human nature, which acted simultaneously upon the two pillars of
morality, (which are otherwise not often assailed together,) of natural
sensibility in the first place, and, in the second, of conscientious
principle.

4. But these were circumstances which applied to the whole population
indiscriminately. Superadded to these, in the case of the emperor, and
affecting _him_ exclusively, was this prodigious disadvantage--that
ancient reverence for the immediate witnesses of his actions, and for the
people and senate who would under other circumstances have exercised the
old functions of the censor, was, as to the emperor, pretty nearly
obliterated. The very title of _imperator_, from which we have derived our
modern one of _emperor_, proclaims the nature of the government, and the
tenure of that office. It was purely a government by the sword, or
permanent _stratocracy_ having a movable head. Never was there a people
who inquired so impertinently as the Romans into the domestic conduct of