To that end he wrote, he studied, he made orations.  He searched the Latin and Greek literatures; and any passage he came on that illumined life or tended towards upliftment, he would copy out and send to be read in the senate; or he would read it there himself to the senators; or publish it as an edict.  There is a touch of the Teacher in this, I think.  He has given Rome Peace; he is master of the world, and now has grown old.  He enjoys no regal splendor, no pomp or retinue; his life is as that of any other senator, but simpler than most.  And his mind is ever brooding over Rome, watchful for the ideas that may purify Roman life and raise it to higher levels.

Many things occurred to sadden his old age.  His best friends were dead; Varus was lost with his legions; there had been the tragedy of Julia, whom he had loved well, and the deaths of the young princes, her sons.  He was a man of extraordinarily keen affections, and all these losses came home to him sorely.

But against every sadness he had his own achievements to set.  There was Rome in its marble visibly about him, that he had found in brick and in ruins; Rome now capable of centuries of life, that had been, when he came to it, a ghastly putridity.

XIX.  AN IMPERIAL SACRIFICE

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”

This is the secret of writing:  look at the external things until you see pulsating behind them the rhythm and beauty of the Eternal.  Only look for it, and persist in your search, and presently the Universal will be revealed shining through the particular, the sweep of everlasting Law through the little object, and happenings of a day.

Come to history with the same intent and method, and at last things appear in their true light.  Here, too, as in a landscape, is the rhythm of the Eternal; here are the Basic Forms.  I doubt if the evidence of the annalists is ever worth much, unless they had an eye to penetrate to these.  When one sees behind the supposed fact narrated and the judgments pronounced the glimmering up of a basic form, one guesses one is dealing with a true historian.

Recently I read a book called The Tragedy of the Caesars, by the novelist Baring-Gould; and in it the life of a certain man presented in a sense flatly contradictory to the views of nineteen centuries anent that man; but it seemed to me at last an account that had the rhythm, the basic form, showing through.  So in this lecture what I shall try to give you will be Mr. Baring-Gould’s version of this man’s life, with efforts of my own to go further and make quite clear the basic form.

What does one mean by ‘basic form’?  In truth it is hard to define.  Only, this world, that seems such a heterogeneous helter-skelter of mournful promiscuities, is in fact the pattern that flows from the loom of an Eternal Weaver:  a beautiful pattern, with its rhythms and recurrences; there is no haphazard in it; it is not mechanical,—­yet still flawless as the configuarations of a crystal or the petals of a perfect flower.