of doctors might write death-certificates; you might have Rome coffined and nailed down, and be riding gaily to the funeral;—­but you could not convince her she was dead; and at the very graveside, sure enough, the ‘pesky critter’ (as they say) would be bursting open the coffin lid; would finish the ceremony with you for the corpse, and then ride home smiling to enjoy her triumph, thank God for his mercies,—­and get back to her hoe and her cabbages as quickly as might be.

It is this that to my mind makes it philosophically certain that she had had a vast antiquity as the seat of empire; I mean, before the Etruscan domination. Dea Roma,—­the Idea of Rome,—­ was an astral mold almost cast in higher than astral stuff:  it was so firmly fixed, so unalterably there, that I cannot imagine a few centuries of peasant-bandits building it,—­unimaginative tough creatures at the best.  No; it was a heritage; it was built in thousands of years, and founded upon forgotten facts.  There was something in the ideal world, the deposit of long ages of thinking and imagining.  How, pray, are nations brought into being?

By men thinking and willing and imagining them into being.  Such men create an astral matrix; with walls faint and vague at first, but ever growing stronger as more and more men reinforce them with new thought and will and imagination.  But in Rome we see from the first the astral mold so strong that the strongest party feelings, the differences of a conqueror and a conquered race, are shaped by it into compromise after compromise.  And then, too, an instinct among those peasant-bandits for empire:  an instinct that few European peoples have possessed; that it took the English, for example, a much longer time to learn than it took the Romans.  For let us note that even in those early days it was not such a bad thing to come under Roman sway; if you took it quietly, and were misled by no patriotic notions.  That is, as a rule.  Unmagnanimous always to men, Rome was not without justice, and even at times something quite like magnanimity, to cities and nations.  She was no Athens, to exploit her subject peoples ruthlessly with never a troubling thought as to their rights.  She had learned compromise and horse sense in her politics it home:  if her citizens owed her a duty, —­she assumed a responsibility towards them.  It took her time to learn that; but she learned it.  She went conquering on the same principle.  Her plebeians had won their rights; in other towns, mostly, the plebeians had not.

Roman dominion meant usually a betterment of the conditions of the plebs in the towns annexed, and their entering in varying degrees upon the rights the plebs had won at Rome.  She went forward taking things as they came, and making what arrangements seemed most feasible in each case.  She made no plans in advance; but muddled trough like an Englishman.  She had no Greek or French turn for thinking things out beforehand;