power upon his weakness.  In fact, the whole philosophy on this subject will be found practically embodied in the household economy of Rome about the time of Hannibal, as unfolded by Plautus.  The relations of master and servant are there exhibited in a state of absolute pessimism:  any thing worse, it is beyond the wit of men to imagine.  Respect or deference on the part of the slave towards his master, there is none:  contempt more maliciously expressed for his master’s understanding, familiarity more insolent, it is difficult to imagine.  This was in part a tendency derived from republican institutions:  but in part also it rests upon the vicious independence in the master of all authority founded upon moral forces.  Instant physical coercion, the power of cross, gallows, pistrinum, and the domestic scourge—­these were the forces which made the Roman master careless of verbal disrespect, indifferent to censure, from them whose opinions were as impotent as those of an infant.  The slave, again, on his side, is described as so thoroughly degraded, that he makes the disfiguration of his own person by the knout, the cancellation of his back by stripes and scars—­a subject of continual merriment.  Between two parties thus incapacitated by law and usage for manly intercourse, the result was exactly such by consummation as on many parts of the Continent it still is by tendency.  The master welcomed from his slave that spirit of familiar impertinence which stirred the dull surface of domestic life, whilst, at any moment, a kick or a frown could silence the petty battery when it was beginning to be offensive.  Without a drawback, therefore, to apprehend where excesses too personal or stinging could be repressed as certainly as the trespasses of a hound, the Plautine master drew from his servant, without anxiety, the comic services which, in the middle ages, were drawn from the professional “fool.”  This original vice in the constitution of society, though greatly mitigated, in the course of two centuries from the era of Plautus, by the progress of intellectual luxury, was one main fountain of that coarseness which, in every age, deformed the social intercourse of Romans; and, especially, it was the fountain of that odious scurrility and tongue-license which defeated the majestic impression else sure to have waited on the grand position of the senate.  Cicero himself was as great a ruffian in his three functions of oratory, viz. at the bar, in the popular assemblies, and in the senate—­he was as foul a libeller—­as malignant—­and as plebeian in his choice of topics—­as any “verna” in Rome when sparring with another “verna.”  This scandal of Roman society was not, undoubtedly, a pure product, from the vernile scurrility of which we hear so much in Roman writers—­other causes conspired; but certainly the fluency which men of rank exhibited in this popular accomplishment of Billingsgate had been at all times sustained by the models of this kind resounding for ever in the streets