regarded with respect by every patriot for having been the place "where Queen Elizabeth was born." The day of the christening of the little Princess Elizabeth was a great day in Greenwich. Shakspeare has rightly deemed it worthy of especial commemoration. The Lord Mayor of Londonvery little in those days could be done without the presence of the lord mayor -came down the Thames in his barge, and wearing his gold chain. All the aldermen and other civic dignitaries were there in their robes of office. The trumpets sounded; the heralds marshalled the way. Great warriors and statesmen, profound theologians, and earnest divines who were embracing the cause of the Reformation, and some of whom, during the subsequent Bonner persecution, were to seal their testimony with their blood, stood near the font. The little fair-haired princess, wrapped in a robe of purple velvet, was formally named Elizabeth. The voice of Garter King-at-Arms was then heard proclaiming loudly, "God, of his infinite mercy, send a prosperous life and long, to the high and mighty Princess Elizabeth of England!" Was not this official prayer of Garter King-at-Arms granted? Was not her life long? And was it not prosperous? Had this little princess not lived long and prosperously, England, and the history of England, must have been very different from what they now are. Queen Elizabeth liked to live at Greenwich. Much of her life was spent there, and many memorable events occurred while she dwelt within the palace walls. Business and amusement, diplomacy and boat - racing, politics and tournaments, all went on at the same time. The queen, with loving eyes, watched the prowess of her favorite Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was frequently one of the knights who held the lists against all comers. The ambassadors manœuvred, each playing his master's game, and eagerly bidding against each other for Elizabeth's hand, that with it they might render England a mere second-rate dependency. But Elizabeth would neither be bought and sold, nor allow her country to be bought and sold. It was at Greenwich, in 1561, that a very memorable consultation was held, in which it was debated whether a papal nuncio were to be received, and whether England should be represented at the Council of Trent. Both questions were finally decided in the negative. Amid the brilliant sunshine of English life, in those days when England was indeed merry England, and before Puritanism had thrown its darker shadows over the national horizon, the country was steadily asserting its political and theolog ical independence. The queen advanced hesitatingly and cautiously, feeling her way at every step. But she did advance, and there was and could be no falling back. The nation took its sovereign at her word. Elizabeth could not refuse to pay the bond she had given. But she had many difficulties, which her loyal subjects, who cheered her as she stepped into her barge at Greenwich, or drove through the city to Westminster, very imperfectly comprehended. With her it could not always be plain sailing, though historians, three hundred years after the events they relate, show, much to their own satisfaction, that her course ought always to have been direct. Many anxious thoughts had Elizabeth, in her royal and maiden loneliness, as from her palace windows at Greenwich she gazed at her busy metropolis just above the bend of the river, which was then really a pleasant stream flowing purely and brightly, and London itself had as yet no heavy cloud constantly over it from the smoke of "sea-coal," but lifted proudly its head to the clear azure sky. On the evening of the 4th of June, 1561, as the queen was looking towards London, she saw red flames rising from St. Paul's Cathedral. There had been a thunderstorm during the afternoon. The spire was struck with lightning; the cross and the great eagle on the summit fell through the south transept; and the noble specimen of English architecture, which, with the revolutions in religion, had undergone so many vicissitudes, was soon almost destroyed. Many years were to elapse before the noble edifice of Sir Christopher Wren was to be seen as it is now, towering in noble eminence over the lesser buildings of the metropolis. But it is to be hoped that the days of Macaulay's New Zealander are still in the far distance, and that for many centuries, from Greenwich, and especially from Blackheath Hill Point, the dome of St. Paul's, and the more recent Victoria Tower to the left, may still be plainly visible, looming grandly through the atmosphere of fog and smoke. This close proximity to London, which is now considered a drawback, gave a peculiar charm to Greenwich in the days of Queen Elizabeth. The imagination dwells more particularly on two scenes which occurred almost a quarter of a century from each other there, and which even now cannot be contemplated without deep and painful emotion. On the 22d of June, 1566, five years after the burning of St. Paul's, the queen had a large party. Nearly all the notabilities of England were assembled within the palace walls. Never had Elizabeth's court appeared more magnificent. Never had the queen herself been more gracious or in higher spirits. She had a good word and a pleasant smile for everybody. A messenger enters the brilliant assembly, and goes quietly up to Cecil, who immediately afterwards is seen saying something in the ear of his royal mistress. The queen's manner suddenly changes; she drops listlessly on a seat, and presses her hand to her forehead. For three days Sir James Melville had been riding hard from Edinburgh to London, with the great news that Mary Stuart had given birth to an heir, who was to inherit both kingdoms. "The Queen of Scots," said Elizabeth, mournfully, "is mother of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock!" Little reason, however, had she really to envy the Queen of Scots, or her successors of the doomed Stuart line. Elizabeth is again at Greenwich. It is again evening, and some two-and-twenty years more have passed and gone. What joyful sounds are these that come to Elizabeth's ears in her palace? London is almost wild with exultation. The bells from every church peal out merrily; the bonfires from every open place may be seen lighting up the sky. There seems to be a general holiday; all is joy and uproar. The queen asks the meaning of this popular demonstration. She is at last told that all this is the rejoicing of the Londoners at the news of the execution of the Scottish queen. Elizabeth turns deathly pale, bursts into tears, and declares that she hears of this execution for the first time. For days Elizabeth weeps, and shuts herself up disconsolately within the palace walls. But tears will not bring the dead back again to life, or wipe out the blot which the execution has left upon Elizabeth's reign and memory. The first Stuart kings frequently resided at Greenwich; but after the death of Queen Elizabeth the palace can scarcely be regarded as the regular dwellingplace of the English monarchs. With the greatest and last of the Tudor sovereigns, though Henrietta Maria had a building long afterwards called by her name, the royal glories of Greenwich may almost be said to have departed. If we are to credit a manuscript of Frederick van Bassen, which Mr. Peter Cunningham has thought deserving of credit, Greenwich, so associated with the memory of Queen Elizabeth, very narrowly escaped a great dishonor in the reign of Charles II. We are informed that Nell Gwynne was all but created Countess of Greenwich. The good-hearted though very extravagant little orange woman may have been quite as worthy of aristocratic honors as Charles II.'s Duchess of Portsmouth, or his Duchess of Cleveland. But still we may be thankful that poor Nelly did not take the title of countess from the place "where Queen Elizabeth was born." For more than a century and a half Greenwich has been left to the old seamen. During the last two or three years, however, a young scion of royalty has again taken root in the neighborhood. Prince Arthur now resides, with his tutor, at the ranger's house on Black. heath, and has, it is supposed, since the death of Lord Canning, been in training for the rangership. As the prince on his pony canters about the heath and round Greenwich, he at least revives some of the associations connected with royalty. No doubt he will make as good a ranger of the park as anybody else, though the boards with the name of the once famous "Aberdeen" upon them still meet the eye, and speak with sad significance of a time and a career which seem long ago to have passed away, and yet ten years. ago Lord Aberdeen was prime minister, and the Crimean war had just begun. If Greenwich cannot recently boast grandchildren." There were brave men before Agamemnon and brave men after him. But still let us all honor bravery in sovereigns, and ministers, and old sailors, in the dead and in the living, at the birthplace of Queen Elizabeth, and wherever it may be found as an animating principle giving something of an heroic aspect to the world. EMPERORS.* NOTWITHSTANDING the labors of mod much of the presence of sovereigns, yet the town can scarcely complain. It has still reason annually to rejoice at the patronage of ministers. Is there not such an institution as the ministerial whitebait dinner? It has become part of the constitution, and may perhaps last as long. One Saturday afternoon in last July, a city steamboat, gayly decorated with flags, bearing the red cross on a white ground, and with the union jack, testifying of course to the presence of the Lords ROMAN MANNERS UNDER THE EARLIER of the Admiralty, was observed coming rapidly down the river. "That, sir,' said a communicative old waterman, "is the ministers' boat." It stopped just opposite the Trafalgar Hotel. As the tide was rather low, there was some difficulty in getting ashore. A narrow plank was to be crossed, and some very wet and slippery wooden steps were to be mounted before the passengers could consider themselves safely within the hospitable precincts of the celebrated hotel. Yet, undaunted by such difficulties, the first of the illustrious party who made his way from the steamboat and up the steps was the ministerial chief, the political veteran of eighty years. At how many annual whitebait dinners he has been present! How many political vicissitudes they have chronicled! Not one of the colleagues who were with him at the last dinner were present at his first. He is the sole survivor of those former ministers before the Reform Bill, when John Wilson Croker, that fierce Quarterly Reviewer and most officious Secretary of the Admiralty, was a great man, ostentatiously patronizing the First Lord. Yet how bravely this old man of eighty summers bears up under this "weight for age," with the memories of so many governments, of hard official work, of difficulties overcome, of fierce enmities encountered, of celebrated actions done in the name of England by land and sea throughout the world! Here in one sense is a type of the Elizabethan statesman, like that Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, of whom Mr. Froude says that, after remembering a Plantagenet king and Bosworth Field, he was yet in Elizabeth's first parliament Lord High Treasurer of England at eighty-four years of age, and "still vigorous and serviceable, with a mind as clear and a hand as steady as the best of the contemporaries of his ern historians, and of their esquires, the collectors and digestors of what, for want of a better name, are usually called Antiquities, it will yet take some time to disabuse the popular mind of the erroneous notions engendered by the ancient method of teaching Roman history. This (and we may appeal to the evidence of more than one handbook still in use at our public schools, if not at the Universities) consisted in dragging the breathless student past a long array of facts more or less critically transcribed from Livy, with a cold infusion of certain of Niebuhr's theories, and bringing him to a sudden standstill with the downfall of the Roman republic and the establishment of the empire. He was perhaps provided with a bare list of the earlier emperors and their dates, and taught to look upon them as a long train of monsters, only occasionally interspersed with an equally abnormal angel of light under the name of Titus or Trajan. The names of the component provinces of the Roman empire he was made to learn by heart, but his ideas of its population he was left to form from an assiduous study of the most objectionable of Juvenal's Satires and Martial's Epigrams, and of the sustained invective of Tacitus. The consequences of this method of teaching, or leaving untaught, Roman history were not limited to a fatal ignorance or halfknowledge of one of its most important periods. The student never imagined that most of that part of our civilization which we owe to the Romans, including the essential elements of all subsequent * der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine. work of a living picture of the greatest wonder wrought by human endeavor-the Roman Empire. In connection with future works in reference to the period we speak of-the first two centuries of the Roman empire the labors of an antiquarian like Professor Friedländer of Königsberg will probably prove of inestimable value. The two volumes already published by him under the modest title of Essays on the History of Roman Manners in the time from Augustus to the end of the Antonines by no means profess to be a systematic picture of Roman life during that period. For such an effort on a larger scale than that of an elementary handbook it may be doubted whether the materials are yet sufficiently digested; and, at all events, the Professor states that the resources of the University to which he is attached do not place them at his command. There is accordingly a looseness of arrangement in his book which will leave it, even when completed, incomplete; and he passes and re-passes from what are called public antiquities to private, with the utmost freedom. We confess that we do not object to the absence of any attempt at giving a fictitious unity to a work of a naturally discursive character by adopting a device such as W. A. Becker employed in the composition of his Gallus. The labor of comparing passages, and estimating their relative value as evidence, never seemed to us to be perceptibly lightened by infusing into it a feeble effort at narrative. The idea was taken from Böltiger's Sabina, a twaddling opuscule by a twad systems of law and government, was derived from the very period which remained to him a blank mystery. The history of the Roman republic is, and will always remain, a history of its wars, for its very constitutional development was not only affected, but conditioned, by them. When Augustus gave peace to the Roman empire, he gave to the world the first real breathing-time it had enjoyed in the course of what is known as ancient history. Generally speaking, this breathing-time continued without any interruption of real importance for at least a couple of centuries. The period of the Antonines was the culmination of the reign of peace. Not until the beginnings of the great revolution which was to usher in the so-called middle ages on the ruins of Roman antiquity made themselves perceptible, not until the great wandering of the peoples had commenced was there any real danger threatening the security of an empire including the main part of the known, and the whole of the civilized, world. During this period, therefore, beyond all others, the Roman empire consolidated itself into a consistency which enabled its Western division to maintain itself through a lifeand-death struggle lasting through a further period of equal length. No doubt, also, during this period it nourished those elements of internal corruption which contributed to its ultimate fall. To analyze and digest the elements and the workings of Roman civilization, in the only period in which it was permitted full play, is the task on which many living and future scholars will have to expend long-continued labors before any-dling author, the limited scope of which thing like a satisfactory result shall have been obtained. To combine the results of their research is the no less difficult duty of the historian. While we gratefully acknowledge the performances of modern historians of the earlier Roman empire-while we, above all, can claim for an English scholar, Mr. Merivale, the honor of having achieved in this department what most nearly approaches to completeness-neither he nor any of them would, we are sure, desire to regard their labors as final. New materials present themselves while the old are being digested into shape; and the more materials arise, the more welcome they are as contributions towards the yet unachieved may have rendered it admissible. But those who read Gallus or Charicles for the information contained in them are not likely to be entranced by the story with which either work is accredited to the general public, which may be left to feed its craving for antiquarian research with Last Days of Pomperi and Hypatia. The story, moreover, in the case of Gallus, is additionally objectionable from its converting one of the most disagreeable characters of the reign of Augustus into the flat hero of a flat romance. While the first volume of Professor Friedländer's work is chiefly devoted to a description of Roman society at Rome, particularly dwelling on its relations to of the citizen of a community which had forcibly constituted itself the chief inheritor of all the art-treasures of the ancient world to become somewhat blasés about art. And he sees in it a new point of analogy between the Romans and a great modern nation, which, notwithstanding the uncomplimentary character of his remark, we must allow him to indicate in his own words: "In truth, this feeling of interest [in art] was for the most part quite superficial and external, conditioned generally by the name of the particular artist and the celebrity of the particular work. 'Ut semel vidit, transit et contentus est, ut si picturam aliquam vel staTacitus; and this might no doubt have been tuam vidisset,' we read in the Dialogue of said with truth of the preponderating majority of Roman travellers. They saw in order to have seen; and in this respect the travels of the Romans of those days resembled those of the English of our own, as well as in their eager and conscientious inquiry into historical reminiscences." the Imperial Court (we would especially of history generally prevailed over a direct attention to his remarks on the purely artistic taste. Professor Friedclientela of the empire as distinct from länder possibly a little exaggerates this that of more ancient times, and to his circumstance, the reason of which is partexposition of the workings of the Impe-ly to be sought in the natural tendency rial secret police), part of the second is occupied with a subject the novel and exhaustive treatment of which is likely to attract more especial notice. We refer to the lengthy disquisition on the subject of the travels of the Romans. It is divided, with the precision of a sermon, under several heads-namely, the means of travel, its manner, its causes, its principal objects, and lastly its sources of interest. At the outset, Professor Friedländer reminds his readers that travelling was easier in the greater part of the Roman empire than it ever was in modern Europe before the present century; a paradox calculated at first sight to take away the breath of us moderns, but as indubitably true as the equally startling fact that the diffusion of literature was far more extensive in the Roman empire than in the modern world before very recent improvements in the art of print ing. Passing to the last division of the subject, we find Professor Friedländer broadly asserting that the sources of interest to Roman travellers in the countries and places visited by them almost everywhere connected themselves with the reminiscences of the past rather than the impressions of the present. The Roman was not, like the Greek, the child of the day; he was rather the heir of the past. The historical interest in travel was everywhere, in the first place, fed by the temples, which usually were at the same time the largest and the most beautiful, as well as the most ancient and famous, edifices of each separate locality. A modern traveller is accustomed to seek the cathedral or principal church as the most promising object of visit, even in cities of our own day; but an ancient temple gave far more to interest the visitor than even the most famous and beautiful modern cathedral can afford. A temple was in most cases not only an edifice, but, as its name implies, a park. It was also a museum, not only of statues and pictures dedicated to the fane, but of other objects of art, of the natural curiosities, and of historical relics. As such it was best calculated to satisfy the longings of a Roman mind, in which the love On the other hand, Professor Friedländer is of opinion that the interest awakened in the Romans by objects of nature greatly exceeded that called forth by objects of art, though the former feeling was of a different character from modern enthusiasm for beautiful scenery. This touches upon a much vexed and agitated question, which derives new light from the Professor's exhaustive treatment of it. He is anxious to show how the interest of the Romans, and of the ancients generally, differed in kind rather than in intensity from that of our own times for the same subject. Above all, the ancient love of nature is distinguished from the modern by its religious character. The period of which the work before us treats prevents the author from doing more than touching upon the original sources of this feeling. A Roman of the empire could not wander under oaks, and on the banks of streams, with the same childlike feeling of the immediate presence of Dryads and Naiads which moved the natural devotion of a Greek of the Homeric days. The Greeks even of a later period preserved this indefinable sense of the |