twenty millions; many authorities think that figure too high; but Gibbon may well be right, or even under the mark,—­and it may account for the rapid decline that followed the age of the Antonines.  For I suspect that a too great population is a great danger, that hosts at such times pour into incarnation, besides those that have good right to call themselves human souls;—­that the maxim “fewer children and better ones” is based upon deep and occult laws.  China in her great days would never appear to have had more than from fifty to seventy millions:  the present enormous figures have grown up only since the Manchu conquest.

There was no great stir of creative intellect and imagination in second century Rome:  little noteworthy production in literature after Trajan’s death.  The greatest energies went into building; especially under Hadrian.  The time was mainly static,—­though golden.  There were huge and opulent cities, and they were beautiful; there was enormous wealth; an even and widespread culture affecting to sweetness and light the lives of millions—­ by race Britons, Gauls, Moors, Asiatics or what not, but all proud to be Romans; all sharing in the blessings of the Roman Citizenship and Peace.  Not without self-government, either, in local affairs:  thus we find Welsh clans in Britain still with kings, and stranger still, with senates, of their own.

It was the quiet and perfect moment at the apex of a cycle:  the moment that precedes descent.  The old impulse of conquest flickered up, almost for the last time, under Trajan, some of whose gains wise Hadrian wisely abandoned.  Under whom it was, and under the first Antonine, that the empire stood in its perfect and final form:  neither growing nor decreasing; neither on the offensive nor actively on the defensive.  Now remember the cycles:  sixty-five years of manvantara under Augustus and Tiberius,—­B.C. 29 to A. D. 36.  Then sixty-five mostly of pralaya from 36 to 101; and now sixty-five more of mnavantara under the Five Good Emperors (or three of them), from 101 to 166.

But why stop at 166, you ask.  Had not Marcus Aurelius, the best of them all, until 180 to reign?—­He had; and yet the change came in 166; after that year Rome stood on the defensive until she fell.  It was in that year, you will remember, that King An-tun Aurelius’s envoys reached Loyang by way of Bumiah and the sea.

But note this:  Domitian was killed, and Nerva came to the throne, and Rome had leave to breathe freely again, in five years before the half-cycle of shadows should have ended:  the two years of Nerva, and the first three of Trajan, we may call borrowed by the dawning manvantara from the dusk of the pralaya that was passing.  Now if we took the strictness of the cycles au very pied de lettre, we should be a little uneasy about the last five years of that manvantara; we should expect them at least to be filled with omens of coming evil; we should expect to find in them a dark compensation for the five bright years at the tail of the old pralaya.—­Well, cycles have sometimes a pretty way of fulfilling expectations.  For see what happened:—­