after a day of carnage and of victory!  Think of such a man,—­not master of a little barbaric island or a half-established throne in a country no bigger than a small province, but the supreme sovereign of a vast empire, at the time of its greatest splendor and prosperity, with no mortal power to keep his will in check,—­nothing but the voice within him; nothing but the sense of duty; nothing but the desire of promoting the happiness of others:  and this man a Pagan!

But the state of that Empire, with all its prosperity, needed such a man to arise.  If anything or anybody could save it, it was that succession of good emperors of whom Marcus Aurelius was the last, in the latter part of the second century.  Let us glance, in closing, at the real condition of the Empire at that time.  I take leave of the man,—­this “laurelled hero and crowned philosopher,” stretching out his hands to the God he but dimly saw, and yet enunciating moral truths which for wisdom have been surpassed only by the sacred writers of the Bible, to whom the Almighty gave his special inspiration.  I turn reluctantly from him to the Empire he governed.

Gibbon says, in his immortal History, “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

This is the view that Gibbon takes of the prosperity of the old Roman world under such princes as the Antonines.  Niebuhr, however, a greater critic, though not so great an artist, takes a different view; and both are great authorities.  If Gibbon meant simply that this period was the happiest and most prosperous during the imperial reigns, he may not have been far from the truth, according to his standpoint of what human happiness consists in,—­that external prosperity which was the blessing of the Old Testament, and which Macaulay exalts as proudly as Gibbon before him.  There was this external prosperity, so far as we know, and we know but little aside from monuments and medals.  Even Tacitus shrank from writing contemporaneous history, and the period he could have painted is to us dark, mysterious, and unknown.  Still, it is generally supposed and conceded that the Empire at this time was outwardly splendid and prosperous.  Certainly there was a period of peace, when no wars troubled the State but those which were distant,—­on the very confines of the Empire, and that with rude barbarians, no more formidable in the eyes of the luxurious citizens of the capital than a revolt of the Sepoys to the eyes of the citizens of London, or Indian raids among the Rocky Mountains to the eyes of the people of New York.  And there was the reign of law and order, a most grateful thing to those who had read of the conspiracy of Catiline and the tumults of Clodius, two hundred and fifty years before.  And there was doubtless a magnificent