In the first cycles of the two there is a certain difference in procedure.  In China, a dawn twilight of half a cycle, sixty-five years, from the fall of Chow to the Revival of Literature under the second Han, preceded the glorious age of the Western Hans.  In Rome, the literary currents were flowing for about a half-cycle before the accession of Augustus:  that half-cycle formed a dawn-twilight preceding the glories of the Augustan Age.

It was just when the reign of Han Wuti was drawing towards a sunset a little clouded,—­you remember Ssema Ts’ien’s strictures as to the national extravagance and its results,—­that the Crest-Wave egos began to come in in Rome.  Cicero, eldest of the lights of the great cycle of Latin literature, would have been about twenty when Han Wuti died in 86.  We counted the first “day” of the Hans as lasting from 194 (the Revival of the Literature) to the death of Han Wuti’s successor in 63; in which year, as we saw, Augustus was born.  During the next twenty years the Crest-Wave was rolling more and more into Rome:  where we get Julius Caesar’s career of conquest;—­ it was a time filled with wine of restlessness, and, you may say, therewith ‘drunk and disorderly.’  Meanwhile (from 61 to 49) Han Suenti the Just was reigning in China.  His “Troops of justice” became, after a while, accustomed to victory; but in defensive wars.  Here it was a time of sanity and order, as contrasted with the disorder in Rome; of pause and reflexion compared with the action and extravagance of the preceding Chinese age.  It was Confucian and ethical; no longer Taoist and daringly imaginative; Confucianism began to consolidate its position as the state system.  So in England Puritan sobriety followed Elizabethanism.  Han Wuti let nothing impede the ferment of his dreams:  Han Suenti retrenched, and walked quietly and firmly.  His virtues commanded the respect of Central Asia:  the Tatars brought him their disputes for arbitration, and all the regions west of the Caspian sent him tribute.  China forwent her restless and gigantic designs, and took to quietude and grave consideration.—­So we may perhaps distribute the characteristics of these two decades thus between the three great centers of civilization:  in China, the stillness that follows an apex time; in India, creation at its apex; in Rome, the confusion caused by the first influx of Crest-Wave Souls.

As Octavian rose to power, the House of Han declined.  We hear of a gorging Vitellius on the throne in the thirties; then of several puppets and infants during the last quarter of the century; in A.D. 1, of the dynasty overthrown by a usurper, Mang Wang, who reigned until A.D. 25.  Thus the heyday of Augustan Rome coincides with the darkest penumbra of China.  Then Kwang-wuti, the eldest surviving Han prince, was reinstated; but until two years before the death of Tiberius, he had to spend his time fighting rebels.  Now turn to Rome.