His mother and step-father, with whom he stayed awhile on his journey, urged him to throw the whole matter up:  forgo the improbably fortune and very certain peril, and not rush in where the strongest living might fear to tread.  Why, there was Mark Anthony, Caesar’s lieutenant—­the Hercules, mailed Bacchus, Roman Anthony—­the great dashing captain whom his soldiers so adored—­ even he was shilly-shallying with the situation, and not daring to say Caesar shall be avenged. And Anthony, you might be sure, would want no competitor—­least of all in the boy named heir in Caesar’s will.—­“Oh, I shall go on and take it up,” said Octavius; and went.  And paid Caesar’s debts, as we have seen, presently:  thereby advertising his assumption of all responsibilities.  Anthony began to be uneasy about him; the Senatorial Party to make advances to him; people began to suspect that, possibly, this sickly boy might grow into a man to be reckoned with.

I am not going to follow him in detail through the next thirteen years.  It is a tortuous difficult story; to which we lack the true clues, unless they are to be found in the series of protrait-busts of him taken during this period.  The makers of such busts were the photographers of the age; and, you may say, as good as the best photographers.  Every prominent Roman availed himself of their services.  Mr. Baring-Gould, in his Tragedy of the Caesars, arranges, examines, and interprets these portraits of Augustus; I shall give you the gist of his conclusions, which are illuminating.—­First we see a boy with delicate and exceedingly beautiful features, impassive and unawakend:  Octavius when he came to Rome.  A cloud gathers on his face, deepening into a look of intense anguish; and with the anguish grows firmness and the clenched expression of an iron will:  this is Octavian in the dark days of the thirties.—­the anguish passes, but leaves the firmness behind:  the strength remains, the beauty remains, and a light of high serenity has taken the place of the aspect of pain:  this is Augustus the Emperor.  The same writer contrasts this story with that revealed by the busts of Julius:  wherein we see first a gay insouciant dare-devil youth, and at last a man old before his time; a face sinister (I should say) and haunted with ugly sorrow.

We get no contemporary account of Augustus; no interpeting biography from the hand of any one who knew him.  We have to read between the lines of history, and with what intuition we can muster:  and especially the story of that lonely soul struggling through the awful waters of the years that followed Caesar’s death.  We see him allying himself first with one party, then with another; exercising (apparently) no great or brilliant qualities, yet by every change thrown nearer the top; till with Anthony and Lepidus he is one of the Triumvirate that rules the world.  Then came those cruel proscriptions.  This is the picture commonly seen:—­a cold keen