turned to her place! Sylla looked at her, in amazement, as if to inquire the motive of such unwonted familiarity. "Wonder not, Sylla, at what I have done," said Valeria, "I wished to share a little in thy good fortune!" The haughty Dictator pleased at this expression of faith in his fortune," having satisfied himself as to her family and character, married the noble matron not long after.

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But the forbearance of the gods, to speak the language of a great philosopher, could no longer endure the sight of calamities such as Sylla inflicted on the Romans! A malady, the most hideous that can be sent upon man, both to humiliate his pride and torture his frame, came on Sylla-the "Morbus Pediculosus!" The Fortunate, saw his very flesh, as it were, turned into lice, "so that though many persons were employed, both day and night, to clean him, the part taken away was trifling compared with what remained-his baths, his whole attire, his very food were filled with a perpetual flow of vermin and corruption;" and, the Loved of Venus, "though he bathed many times a day, to cleanse and purify his body, could not free himself from the pollution of the most obscene of insects!" And yet, under the very hand of Providence, Sylla bent not in suppliant repentance of his crimes; for, on the very day before he died, "having been informed, that the quæstor Granius would not pay what he owed him, but waited for his death to avoid paying it, he had him dragged before him, by his slaves, and strangled in his presence." This was the last scene of the long and bloody drama of Sylla's life. The violence with which he spoke, on that occasion, caused the breaking of a blood vessel; his strength now failed fast. and after he had passed the night in extreme agony, he expired.

We cannot explain by what a train of reasoning Montesquieu, from the history of Sylla's life, such as ancient historians, rather partial than hostile to his fame, have written it, arrived at the conclusion he has expressed in the celebrated dialogue between Sylla and a Greek Sophist that "through his whole career, the Dictator had constantly in view. the restoring, to Rome, her free institutions, after he had freed them from tribunitial encroachments." Was it to retemper the fallen energies of the Roman people that Sylla let loose on the citizens his licentious soldiery, giving up a prey to their avarice, the wealth of the enemies he had proscribed?

His murder of Granius, of itself, shows sufficiently that the pretended abdication of his Dictatorship, was but a farce played for his own amusement before the Roman people! a Questor seized by slaves, and strangled by them! who but a Dictator could order this, who but such an absolute Magistrate find the executors of such an

act? Was it to wrest power from the hands of proletaries, and confide it into the keeping of the opulent and high-born, that the Dictator doomed the inhabitants of Præneste to a general slaughter? That he levelled to the ground, as if swept by some dire earthquake, all the cities of the Samnites? And, above all, we ask, was it to reestablish the early purity of Roman manners, that sitting as a Magistrate in the Forum, surrounded by astrologers, pathics, and courtezans, he himself sold at public auction the estates of those Romans whom he had proscribed, or slain? There was in the retaliatory revenge of Marius something of the sudden rage of the provoked lion, which relents as soon as it has conquered. But Sylla, like the tiger, in the wantonness of mirthful cruelty, played with his prey!

The arts, letters; nay poetry, which he loved, and had studied with no ordinary success, had failed to soften or to purify as is their wont, his savage nature. His learning seemed as if it pandered to his evil genius, bringing in aid of its fiendish propensities, bitter allusions, desolating sarcasms drawn from ancient lore, to point the epigrams with which he delighted to lacerate the sensibility, at the same time that the executioner tortured the body, of his victim. But Sylla, contends his apologists, magnanimously abdicated, of his own accord, the supreme power that he might have retained through life-a noble selfdenial this, which should disarm history of some of its severity in the examination of the Dictator's acts! It is not true that he abdicated absolute power; he only allowed the senate and the people to confer the title of Consuls upon citizens who exercised no real authority in the state. To no one did he entrust the command of an army. Mithridates was suffered to repair, undisturbed and unchecked, the disasters of his recent defeats. The Gauls were still independent and dreaded; while another power of sudden growth and strength, boded long and difficult wars in the East!

Sylla, having crushed Marius, allowed no rival ambition to rise to power and fame. Besides, the veteran legions that had conquered in Charonea, at Orcchomenes, and brought their great leader triumphant from Pontus to Rome, were unwilling to begin another war, under any other chief but Sylla. He had promised them, land, gold, and repose; and when they claimed these at his hands, he distributed to them the inheritance of one hundred proscribed or slaughtered Roman citizens ! These military colonists were quartered, as it were, within hearing of the Dictator's voice, had he called for the aid of their swords. Sylla, when he broke the golden palm, the symbol of the dictatorship, did not lay aside the shield he bore when he scaled the walls of Athens, nor throw away the spear that had subdued Mithridates, Carbo,

Cinna, and the younger Marius. To the very day of his death he reigned absolute over Rome.

Pompey, whom he had saluted by the title of "The Great," (perhaps in mockery of his self-conceit, since, at that time, he was only vain and pompous,) was satisfied with having been thus flattered in public. Crassus, pretended to be altogether devoted to the increase of an opulence, already proverbial; Lucullus, loitered in learned indolence; Sertorius had fled to Lusitania, ready to defend himself there, if his life was sought after. The terror of Sylla's name curbed equally all these rival ambitions; nay, Cæsar himself (the greatest homage offered to the Dictator's resistless supremacy) adjourned the execution of his plans of future glory, feigning to rest satisfied with the metaphorical palms of eloquence, (the noblest ever won by a Roman, save those gathered by Cicero,) which he had already entwined with the myrtle, sacred to his divine ancestress: leaving with simulated apathy in the firm grasp of Sylla's hand, the actual golden palm leaf, the dread symbol of unlimited dictatorial power, together with those laurels, destined to replace on his victorious brow hereafter, (a glorious substitute,) the locks precautiously plucked by austere thoughts and surhuman toils? But, when informed that Sylla (as if he had read in his very soul) had declared “That he saw more than one Marius in that effeminate youth, in spite of his loosely girdled gown,” he abruptly left Rome, lest the Dictator should lay violent hands on him. After such a deferential acknowledgment of his power-the mastermind of Cæsar, shrinking, from an encounter with a mightier and far darker spirit-Sylla, in spite of the empty pageant of his abdication, might well smile in contempt at the impotent wrath of the youth, who, (foolishly believing in the reality of the shadowy exhibition presented, as any other show to amuse a degenerate people,) assailed him with harsh and opprobious words, and even threw stones at him; aware as he was that twenty-seven legions of veteran soldiers devoted to his fortune, and cultivating, as their own fields, the estates of one hundred thousand Roman citizens slaughtered by the command of their general, either to satiate his wrath, or to make room for themselves, were ever ready, at his call, to defend his person, and to sustain the authority of his acts.

It has not been our intention either to lessen the glory acquired by Sylla in battle, or to cast a shade over the lustrous endowments of a mind, capable of conceiving plans of aggrandisements so vast, and to execute them with success so uninterrupted as that which followed him in counsels, and in so many battles. His attributing himself this constant tide of good fortune, to a blind felicity attached to his person,

seems to us, on the contrary, a proof when he thus wantonly lessened the merits of his high deeds, that Sylla's mind, through the infatuation of prosperity and unlimited power, had lost the faculty of correctly judging, even in relation to his noblest actions! We had, indeed, no motive to induce us, even if blindly swayed by admiration for the hero whose fame we have sought to rescue from undeserved opprobrium, to lower Sylla in order to elevate Marius. The giant stature of the glorious peasant of Arpinum, wearing on his head seven consular laurel wreaths, requires no artifice of contrasts, to tower above all contemporaneous renown!

Sylla possessed the higher qualities of a general-valour, (this quality we place first; it is not one, in its more extended meaning, so common as is generally believed,) activity, vigilance, promptness to resolve, vigour to execute. He, as often succeeded, to use the expression of Carbo," through the arts of the fox, as through the strength and courage of the lion," but, if his attempt to seduce or bribe his adversary failed, he always obtained with his sword the victory that his gold could not purchase. No commander, except Hannibal, Cæsar, and Napoleon, was ever so loved by his soldiers-and when in want of funds, instead of seditiously clamouring for their pay, they offered to lend him all the money they had. It is true, that he had never to contend against any chief of talents equal to his own, except in the battle in sight of Rome, when he met Telesinus the Samnite; for Marius had no troops under him, when Sylla, at the head of six legions drove him out of Rome; and had fate allowed another year of life to the aged warrior, he who, to use Plutarch's words, never committed a fault in war, and never lost a battle!" keeping his troops united, instead of spreading them in detachments over Italy as Carbo, and Lapides did, during the civil war, he would have taught Sylla, that even to Felix Epaphroditus, fortune might prove inconstant.

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But in the memorable battle fought in sight of the Roman people, Sylla displayed all the resources of his genius-there was no hesitation on his part; he pursued Telesinus with such celerity, that he came up in time to sustain, with his whole infantry, the charge of the cavalry led on by Balbus-nor did he spare his person, in this crisis of his fortune, when Rome itself was the stake fought for; and, if his white Numidian Horse made him a conspicuous mark for the javelins of the Samnites, it showed to the legions, too, their intrepid leader, bearing like themselves, the brunt of the well fought day. The division which Sylla commanded was defeated, it is true, in spite of all his efforts, but, not faithless to his fortune as the last of the Romans at Philipdi, he was ready to improve to the utmost the advantage obtained by his lieutenant

in another part of the field; he resembled Cæsar and Napoleon in this, that when victorious he gave his adversary no rest: still pressing on them with indefatigable vigour, till he had destroyed all organization in the retreating army!

POLITICAL PORTRAITS, WITH PEN AND PENCIL.

NO. XXIII.

HENRY D. GILPIN.

FEW men have made their way in this country, at so early an age, by the unaided influence of modest merit, to a more enviable position of political and professional eminence, combined with a not inferior literary and social reputation, than the present Attorney General. And in selecting a subject for the present number of our "Political Portraits," from the long array of honourable names that crowd upon our mind, no more suitable choice could be made than that of the writer from whose elegant pen have proceeded several of the most interesting biographies that have appeared in the earlier course of the series.

Mr. Gilpin belongs to a respectable family which emigrated to Pennsylvania at about the time of the establishment of the colony by William Penn, settling on the banks of the Brandywine near the boundary of Pennsylvania and Delaware. His grandfather removed to Philadelphia in the year 1740, and being a man much devoted to scientific pursuits, was among the associates of Franklin-whose personal friendship he enjoyed-in founding the American Philosophical Society; of which venera ble institution he ever after continued an active and useful member. Of his brothers, two were officers in the revolutionary army. The younger of these, Colonel George Gilpin, of Fairfax County, Virginia, was the neighbour of Washington; and having been honoured with his friendship was one of those who were selected to bear his remains to the tomb. The father of the subject of the present sketch, Mr. Joshua Gilpin, was long and well known, until his removal some years since to the State of Delaware, as an eminent and much respected merchant of Philadelphia.

His son Henry. D. Gilpin, the eldest of a large family, was born in the year 1801, and received the rudiments of his education at a grammar