the tactlessness and small vanities that advertise personality in the one; the supreme tact and balance that affirm impersonality in the other.  The personality of Julius must tower above the world; that of Augustus was laid down as a bridge for the world to pass over.  Julius gave his monkeys three chestnuts in the morning and four at night;—­you remember Chwangtse’s story;—­and so they grew angry and killed him.  Augustus adjusted himself; decreed that they should have their four in the morning.  His personality was always under command, and he brought the world across on it.  It never got in the way; it was simply the instrument wherewith he (or the Gods) saved Rome.  He—­we may say he—­did save Rome.  She was dead, this time; dead as Lazarus, who had been three days in the tomb, etc.  He called her forth; gave her two centuries of greatness; five of some kind of life in the west; fifteen, all told, in west and east.  Julius is always bound to make on the popular eye the larger impression of greatness.  He retains his personality with all its air of supermanhood; it is easy to see him as a live human being, to imagine him in his habit as he lived,—­and to be astounded by his greatness.  But Augustus is hidden; the real man is covered by that dispassionate impersonality that saved Rome.  If all that comes down about the first part of his life is true, and has been truly interpreted, you could not call him then even a good man.  But the record of his reign belies every shadow that has been cast on that first part.  It is altogether a record of beneficence.

H.P.  Blavatsky speaks of Julius as an agent of the dark forces.  Elsewhere she speaks of Augustus as an Initiate.

Did she mean by that merely an initiate of the Official Mysteries as they still existed at Eleusis and elsewhere?  Many men, good, bad and indifferent, were that:  Cicero,—­who was doubtless, as he says, a better man for his initiation:  Glamininus and his officers; most of the prominent Athenians since the time of Pericles and earlier.  I dare say it had come to mean that though you might be taught something about Karma and Reincarnation, you were not taught to make such teachings a living power in your own life or that of the world.  There is nothing of the Occultists, nothing of the Master Soul, in the life and actions of Cicero; but there was very much, as I shall try to show, in the life and actions of Augustus.  And, we gather from H.P.  Blavatsky, the only Mysteries that survived in their integrity to anything like this time had been those at Bibracte which Caesar destroyed.  (Which throws light, by the bye, on Lucan’s half-sneering remark about the Druids,—­that they alone had real knowledge about the Gods and the things beyond this life.) So it seems to me that Augustus’ initiation implied something much more real,—­much more a high status of the soul,—­than could have been given him by any semi-public organized body within the Roman world.