world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has
found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now
generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an
ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that
have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political
pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that
tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions,
have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential
affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it
will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian
gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian _gens_. It must be confessed
that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything
else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper
character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his
marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet.
They would have been mighty interesting reading,--as full of lies,
probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on
that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained
nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found
defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the
cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear
rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals
were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet
and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists
is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man
who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished
not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which
have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates.