seem to have been actuated by personal and petty motives. Some of them were offended that an old comrade should have attained such a height above them. Some had grudges to avenge, and others hoped to rise upon the ruins of his power. Brutus alone appears to have thought that the death of the despot would restore to Rome its ancient liberty, and it was his name that gave something of dignity to the plot.

Rome was

The spring of the year forty-four, B. C., arrived. all astir with the departing legions and the noise of the dictator's mighty schemes. Cæsar still walked the streets of Rome unattended, and had no guard about his house, nor any escort when he went to the senate-house. Rumors were industriously circulated that he meant to assume the title of king-a name of horror to the Romans. True he had thrice refused the proffered crown, in the sight of the people; but many imagined, and Brutus among them, that he had refused it as a woman often refuses the thing she covets most, refused it that it might be the more strenuously thrust upon him.

On the morning of the ides (the 15th) of March, Cæsar entered the senate-house. The Senate rose, as usual, to do him honor. He took his usual seat. On the pretence of asking the recall of a man whom he had banished, the conspirators gathered round his chair. He gave them, at length, a positive denial, and, as they continued their importunities, he grew angry. One of the men then seized the collar of his robe and drew it off his shoulders, which was the preconcerted signal of attack. Another, with nerveless hand, struck at his neck with his sword, inflicting a slight wound. Cæsar, astonished, laid his hand upon his sword, and said:

"Villain! Casca! what do you mean?"

At once the whole party drew their swords, and Cæsar saw himself hedged about with bristling points. He stood at bay, with his drawn sword, and defended himself as became him, until Brutus thrust his sword into his groin. Then, it is said, he uttered the memorable words:

"Thou, too, Brutus!"

and, dropping the point of his sword, gave up the struggle, and fell pierced with twenty-three wounds.

Fifteen years of civil war followed the assassination of Julius Cæsar. At the time of his death, his nephew, Octavius, a youth of nineteen, was travelling with his tutor. No one supposed that this young man would so much as dare to come to Rome to claim his uncle's private estate. He boldly appeared, however, and joined in the strife for the slain emperor's power. Some of his rivals he overcame by management and flattery; others were destroyed by their own vices; some he overthrew in battle; and, at length, assuming the title of Augustus, he wielded the whole authority of Cæsar, and ruled the vast Roman empire peacefully and ably for forty years. He, too, respected and preserved the ancient forms of the republic. Under him a body called the Senate still held its sessions, and men styled consuls were elected. But Augustus was, in fact, absolute sovereign of the civilized world.

This is the man with whom Louis Napoleon desires to be compared. Like him, he is called the nephew of his imperial predecessor; but Cæsar had only adopted the father of Octavius as his relative, and upon Louis Napoleon's kinship with Napoleon doubts have been cast. Augustus won his throne by a strange mixture of cruelty, cunning, and audacity. Louis Napoleon's throne was gained by craft more than by courage; it was founded in perjury and blood. He will, perhaps, endeavor to show, by and by, that France could be saved from anarchy only by destroying its liberty. So, doubtless, Julius Cæsar reasoned, and so the first Napoleon.

The answer is simple: they never tried to save order and liberty. They attempted only the easier task of concentrating all power in their own hands. Theirs was the small ambition of founding a dynasty, and not the grand ambition of regenerating a country. With all their amazing gifts, history pronounces them little men, because they employed their gifts for an object beneath a great man, their own glory.

To my mind, poor Charles Goodyear, battling with Indiarubber, carrying his pot of lime up Broadway to Greenwich village, wrestling with his material for ten years till he had sub

dued it to a thousand useful purposes, is a more august figure, than any of the Cæsars or either Napoleon. Nevertheless, while the majority of mankind are sunk in ignorance and superstition, Cæsars and Napoleons are inevitable. As a choice of evils, they are sometimes even to be desired. The school-master and the newspaper, good books and enlightened men will gradually render them, first unnecessary and then impossible.

LEWIS CASS.

DETROIT, which is one of our handsomest and most vigorous cities, has one of the prettiest streets in it I ever saw. This street, a mile or two in length, is lined on both sides with remarkably elegant villas and cottages in the modern style, separated from one another, and surrounded by lawns and gardens, and the whole well shaded with trees. These houses are so new and fresh in appearance that a stranger might almost imagine the street to be an architectural fair, to which each architect in the country had sent a specimen of his skill for exhibition. But there is one house in it that presents a strong contrast to the rest. It is a large, brown, old-fashioned farmhouse, a story and a half high, that looks as though it might have been standing there when Hull surrendered the town in 1812. This was the residence for forty years of the late Lewis Cass. He was one of the richest men in the State of Michigan; but, although his neighbors, one after another, built residences for themselves in the new fashion, with all the modern improvements, the old man stuck to the old house to the last. He died there, at the age of eighty-four.

He was, indeed, a very plain man in his habits and tastes. I remember being in the White House at Washington, one rainy afternoon, during the administration of Mr. Buchanan, under whom General Cass was secretary of state. Suddenly there was a shuffling noise overhead, indicating that the cabinet meeting had broken up, and that its members were about to come downstairs. The secretary of state, a portly gentleman with white hair and a reddish face, looking the very picture of an old farmer, came down among the first, chatting and laughing. It was pleasant to see the chief of the cabinet go down the marble

steps of the president's house to where stood an old-fashioned gig, with an old-fashioned horse tied to the railing, and to watch him while he untied the horse with his own hands, get into the ancient vehicle and drive slowly away. It had a democratic look, as we say. We have had one secretary of state who rode about Washington in a carriage and four, with servants in livery. General Cass in his gig was a far more dignified object.

Of all the men who have figured in public life in the United States, Lewis Cass was the person who had the longest and most varied experience. He was a servant of the public for sixty years, in the course of which he filled almost every kind of office and performed almost every kind of duty which can ever devolve upon a citizen of the United States.

Every school-boy knows how the men of New England, as soon as they heard of the shedding of blood at Lexington, shouldered their old muskets and hastened to join the army gathering around Boston. One of those who did so was Jonathan Cass, aged nineteen, a New-Hampshire man, living near Exeter in that State. Entering a New Hampshire regiment as a private, he fought at Bunker Hill, served through the whole war, rose to the rank of captain, and approved himself so good a soldier that he was retained in the army when the war was over, and promoted to the rank of major. This faithful soldier was the father of the late Lewis Cass, who was born at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782, just as the revolution was closing, and the old soldiers were going home.

After the war, Major Cass was much employed in the Ohio country against the Indians, and thus became acquainted with the region lying along the Ohio river, then a wilderness. In the year 1800 he resigned his commission and removed his family across the Alleghany mountains to the new settlement of Marietta, the outpost of civilization. Lewis, however, remained behind. After studying awhile at the academy at Exeter, he had gone to Wilmington, Delaware, where he had obtained employment as a teacher. When he was eighteen years old he walked from Wilmington to Pittsburgh (four hundred and fifty miles), and from Pittsburgh floated down to Marietta (one hundred miles) in a