how strong was the supremacy of paterfamilias at the beginning of the eighth century, when Young Rome had already made more than one audacious display of contempt for the Conscript Fathers.  When Pompeius was asked what he would do, if Caesar should resist the requirements of the Senate, he answered,—­“What if my son should raise his stick against me?”—­meaning to imply, that, in his opinion, resistance from Caesar was something too absurd to be thought of.  Yet Caesar did resist, and triumphed; and, judging from their after-lives, we should say that the Young Pompeys would have had small hesitation in raising their sticks against their august governor, had he proved too disobedient.  A few years earlier, according to Sallust, a Roman, one Fulvius, had caused his son to be put to death, because he had sought to join Catiline.  The old gentleman heard what his son was about, and when Young Hopeful was arrested and brought before him, he availed himself of his fatherly privilege, and had him strangled, or disposed of after some other of those charming fashions which were so common in the model republic of antiquity.  “This imitation of the discipline of the ancient republic,” says Merivale, “excited neither applause nor indignation among the languid voluptuaries of the Senate.”  They probably voted Fulvius a brute, but they no more thought of questioning the legality of his conduct than they did of imitating it.  Law was one thing, opinion another.  If he liked to play Lucius Junius, well and good; but they had no taste for the part.  They felt much as we used to feel in Fugitive-Slave-Law times:  we did not question the law, but we would have nothing to do with its execution.

Modern fathers have had no such powers as were held by those of Rome, and if an Englishman of Red-Rose views had killed his son for setting off to join Edward IV. when he had landed at Ravenspur, no one would think of praising the act.  What was all right in a Roman of the year 1 of the Republic would be considered shocking in a Christian of the fifteenth century, a time when Christianity had become much diluted from the inter-mixture of blood.  In the next century, poor Lady Jane Grey spoke of the torments which she had endured at the hands of her parents, who were of the noblest blood of Europe, in terms that ought to make every young woman thankful that her lot was not cast in the good old times.  Roger Ascham was her confidant.  He had gone to Brodegate, to take leave of her, and “found her in her chamber alone, reading Phaedo Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale of Boccace”; and as all the rest of the Greys were hunting in the park, the schoolmaster inquired why she should lose such pastime.  The lady answered, that the pleasure they were having in the park was but the shadow of that pleasure she found in Plato.  The conversation proceeding, Ascham inquired how it was that she had come to know such