that Cicero, who was one of the college it is no less likely that, while he despised of augurs, wrote a book for the sole pur- all the follies of the vulgar, he had a few pose of turning auguries into ridicule; of his own. The barbarous and dissimubut they have likewise remarked that Ci-lating Louis XI. had a firm faith in the cross of St. Louis. Almost all princes, excepting such as have had time to read, and read to advantage, are in some degree

AUGUSTINE.

cero, at the end of his book says, that
"superstition should be destroyed, but
not religion. For," he adds, "the beauty
of the universe, and the order of the hea-infected with superstition.
venly bodies, force us to acknowledge an
eternal and powerful nature. We must
maintain the religion which is joined with
the knowledge of this nature, by utterly
extirpating superstition; for it is a mon-
ster which pursues and presses us on every
side. The meeting with a pretended di-
viner, a presage, an immolated victim, a
bird, a Chaldean, an aruspice, a flash of
lightning, a clap of thunder, an event ac-
cidently corresponding with what has been
foretold to us, everything disturbs and
makes us uneasy; sleep itself, which
should make us forget all these pains and
fears, serves but to redouble them by
frightful images."

AUGUSTINE, a native of Tagaste, is here to be considered, not as a bishop, a doctor, a father of the Church, but simply as a man. This is a question in physics, respecting the climate of Africa.

Cicero thought he was addressing only a few Romans; but he was speaking to all men and all ages.

When a youth, Augustine was a great libertine, and the spirit was no less quick in him than the flesh. He says, that before he was twenty years old, he had learned arithmetic, geometry, and music, without a master.

Does not this prove that, in Africa, which we now call Barbary, both minds and bodies advance to maturity more ra{pidly than amongst us?

These valuable advantages of St. Augustine, would lead one to believe that Most of the great men of Rome no more Empedocles was not altogether in the believed in auguries, than Alexander VI., wrong, when he regarded fire as the prinJulius II, and Leo X., believed in Our ciple of nature. It is assisted, but by Lady of Loretto and the blood of St. subordinate agents. It is like a king Januarius. However, Suetonius relates governing the actions of all his subjects, that Octavius, surnamed Augustus, was and sometimes inflaming the imaginations so weak, as to believe that a fish, which of his people rather too much. It is not leaped from the sea upon the shore at without reason that Syphax says to Juba, Actium, foreboded that he should gain in the Cato of Addison, that the sun which the buttle. He adds, that having after- rolls its fiery car over African heads, wards met an ass-driver, he asked him places a deeper tinge upon the cheeks, the name of his ass; and the man having and a fiercer flame within their hearts. answered that his ass was named Nicho-That the dames of Zama are vastly supelas, which signifies conqueror of nations, he had no longer any doubts about the victory; and that he afterwards had brazen statues erected to the ass-driver, the ass, and the jumping fish. He further assures es, that these statues were placed in the Capitol.

It is very likely that this able tyrant laughed at the superstitions of the Romans, and that his ass, the driver, and the fish, were nothing more than a joke. But

rior to the pale beauties of the north :

The glowing dames of Zama's royal court
Have faces flushed with more exalted charms;
Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale unripened beauties of the north.

Where shall we find in Paris, Strasburgh, Ratisbon, or Vienna, young men who have learned arithmetic, the mathematics, and music, without assistance, and who have been fathers at fourteen?

Doubtless it is no fable that Atlas, prince of Mauritania, called by the

Greeks the son of heaven, was a celebrated astronomer, and constructed a celestial sphere, such as the Chinese have had for so many ages. The ancients, who expressed everything in allegory, likened this prince to the mountain which bears his name, because it lifts its head above the clouds, which have been called the heavens by all mankind who have judged of things only from the testimony of their eyes.

These Moors cultivated the sciences with success, and taught Spain and Italy for five centuries. Things are greatly altered. The country of Augustine is now but a den of pirates; while England, Italy, Germany, and France, which were involved in barbarism, are greater cultivators of the arts than ever the Arabians were.

written after the horrors of the proscriptions, proves that he was no less a despiser of decency in his language than he was a barbarian in his conduct. This abominable epigram is one of the strongest testimonies to Augustus's infamous immorality. Sextus Pompeius also reproached him with shameful weaknesses -"Effeminatum infectatus est." An

thony, before the triumvirate, declared that Cæsar, great uncle to Augustus, had adopted him as his son, only because he had been subservient to his pleasures"adoptionem avunculi stupro meritum "

Lucius Cæsar charged him with the same crime; and even asserted that he had been base enough to sell himself to Hirtius for a very considerable sum. He was so shameless as to take the wife of a consul from her husband in the midst of a supper; he took her to a neighbouring closet, staid with her there for some time, and brought her back to table, without himself, the woman, or her husband blushing at all at the proceeding.

Our only object, then, in this article, is to show how changeable a scene this world is. Augustine, from a debauchee, becomes an orator and a philosopher; he puts himself forward in the world; he teaches rhetoric; he turns Manichean, and from Manicheism passes to Christianity. He causes himself to be baptized, together with one of his bastards, named Deodatus; he becomes a bishop, and a father of the Church. His system of grace has been reverenced for eleven hun-afraid to translate this licentious letter. dred years, as an article of faith. At the end of eleven hundred years, some Jesuits find means to procure an anathema against Augustine's system, word for word, under the names of Jansenius, St. Cyril, Arnaud, and Quesnel. We ask if this revolution is not, in its kind, as great as that of Africa; and if there be anything permanent upon earth?

We have also a letter from Anthony to Augustus, couched in these terms—“ Ita valeas ut hanc epistolam cùm leges, non inieris Testullam, aut Terentillam, aut Russillam, aut Salviam, aut omnes. Anne refert ubi et in quam arrigas?" We are

AUGUSTUS (OCTAVIUS). The Morals of Augustus. MANNERS can be known only from facts, which facts must be incontestable. It is beyond a doubt that this man, so immoderately praised as the restorer of morals and of laws, was long one of the most infamous debauchees in the Roman commonwealth. His epigram on Fulvia,

Nothing is better known than the scandalous feast of five of the companions of his pleasures with five of the principal women of Rome. They were dressed up as gods and goddesses, and imitated all the immodesties invented in fable

Dum nova Divorum coenat adulteria,

And on the stage he was publicly designated by this famous line

Videsne ut cinaedus orbem digito temperet? Almost every Latin author that speaks of Ovid, asserts, that Augustus had the insolence to banish that Roman knight, who was a much better man than himself, merely because the other had surprised him in an incest with his own daughter Julia; and that he sent his daughter into exile only through jealousy. This is the

1

belonging to the citizens of Mantua and Cremona, thus recompensing murder by depredation.

It is but too certain that the world was ravaged, from the Euphrates to the extremities of Spain, by this man without shame, without faith, honour, or probity, knavish, ungrateful, avaricious, bloodthirsty, cool in the commission of crime, who, in any well-regulated republic, would have been condemned to the greatest of punishments for the first of his offences.

Nevertheless, the government of Au

It is hard to repress our indignation at reading at the commencement of the Geor-gustus is still admired, because under him gies, that Augustus is one of the greatest Rome tasted peace, pleasure, and abunof divinities; and that it is not known dance. Seneca says of him" Clemenwhat place he will one day deign to octiam non voco lassam crudelitatem"-"I cupy in heaven; whether he will reign in do not call exhausted cruelty, clemency." the air, or become the protector of cities, or vouchsafe to accept the empire of the

seas:

Au Deus immensi venías maris, ac tua nauta
Numina sola cetaat tibi serviat ultima Thule.

Ariosto speaks with much more sense as well as grace, when he says in his fine thirty-fifth canto

Non fa si santo ne benigno Augusto
Come la tromba di Virgilio sonna;
Laver avu1o in poesia buon gusto
La proscriptione iniqua gli perdona, &c.
Augustus was not quite so mild and chaste
As he's by honest Virgil represented:
But thes, the tyrant had poetic taste;
With this the poet fully was contented, &c.

The Cruelties of Augustus.

It is thought that Augustus became milder when crime was no longer neces sary to him; and that, being absolute master, he saw that he had no other interest than to appear just. But it appears to me that he still was pitiless rather than clement; for, after the battle of Actium, he had Antony's son murdered at the feet of Cæsar's statue; and he was so barbarous as to have young Cæsarian, the son of Cæsar and Cleopatra, beheaded, though he had recognized him as king of Egypt.

Suspecting one day that the prætor Quintus Gallius had come to an audience with a poniard under his robe, he had him put to the torture in his presence; If Augustus was long abandoned to and, in his indignation at hearing that the most shameful and frantic dissipation, senator call him a tyrant, he tore out his his cruelty was no less uniform and deli-eyes with his own hands; at least, so says berate. His proscriptions were published Suetonius. in the midst of feasting and revelry: he proscribed more than three hundred senators, two thousand knights, and one hundred obscure but wealthy heads of families, whose only crime was their being rich. Anthony and Octavius had them killed, solely that they might get possession of their money; in which they differed not the least from highway robbers, who are condemned to the wheel.

Octavius, immediately after the Persian war, gave his veterans all the lands

We know that Cæsar, his adopted father, was great enough to pardon almost all his enemies; but I do not find that. Augustus pardoned one of his. I have great doubts of his pretended clemency to Činna. This affair is mentioned neither by Suetonius nor by Tacitus. Suetonius, who speaks of all the conspiracies against Augustus, would not have failed to mention the most memorable. The singularity of giving a consulship to Cinna in return for the blackest perfidy, would not have

escaped every cotemporary historian. Dion Cassius speaks of it only after Seneca; and this passage in Seneca has the appearance rather of declamation than of historical truth. Besides, Seneca lays the scene in Gaul, and Dion at Rome: this contradiction deprives the occurrence of all remaining verisimilitude. Not one of our Roman Histories, compiled in haste and without selection, has discussed this interesting fact. Lawrence Echard's History has appeared to enlightened men to be as faulty as it is mutilated: writers have rarely been guided by the spirit of examination.

on Titus, on Trajan, and the Antonines. It even became customary in the complipliments paid to Emperors on their accession, to wish that they might be more fortunate than Augustus, and more virtuous than Trajan.

It is now, therefore, allowable to consider Augustus as a clever and fortunate

monster.

Louis Racine, son of the great Racine, and heir to a part of his talents, seems to forget himself when he says, in his Reflections on Poetry, that "Horace and Virgil spoiled Augustus; they exhausted their art in poisoning the mind of Au

of the one and the appearances of the other, attentive solely to his own interest, employing bloodshed and peace, arms and laws, religion and pleasure, only to make himself master of the earth, and sacrificing everything to himself. Louis Racine only shows us, that Virgil and Horace had servile souls.

Cinna might be suspected, or convicted,gustus by their praises." These expresby Augustus, of some infidelity; and,sions would lead one to believe that the when the affair had been cleared up, he eulogies so meanly lavished by these two might honour him with the vain title of great poets, corrupted this Emperor's fine consul: but it is not at all probable that ‹ disposition. But Louis Racine very well Cinna sought by a conspiracy to seize the knew that Augustus was a very bad man, supreme authority-he, who had never regarding crime and virtue with indiffercommanded an army, was supported byence, availing himself alike of the horrors no party, and was a man of no consideration in the empire. It is not very likely that a mere subordinate courtier would think of succeeding a sovereign who had been twenty years firmly established on his throne, and had heirs; nor is it more likely that Augustus would make him consul immediately after the conspiracy. If Cinna's adventure be true, Augustus pardoned him only because he could not do otherwise, being overcome by the reasoning or the importunities of Livia, who had acquired great influence over him, and persuaded him, says Seneca, that pardon would do him more service than chastisement. It was then only through policy, that he, for once, was merciful; it certainly was not through generosity.

He is, unfortunately, too much in the right when he reproaches Corneille with having dedicated Cinna to the financier Montoron, and said to that receiver, "What you more especially have in common with Augustus is, the generosity with which," &c. for, though Augustus was the most wicked of Roman citizens, it must be confessed that the first of the Emperors, the master, the pacificator, the legislator of the then known world, ought not to be placed absolutely on a level with a clerk to a comptroller-general in Gaul.

Shall we give a robber credit for clemency, because, being enriched and secure, enjoying in peace the fruits of his rapine, he is not every day assassinating the sons and grandsons of the proscribed, The same Louis Racine, in justly conwhile they are kneeling to and worship-demning the mean adulation of Corneille, ping him? After being a barbarian, he and the baseness of the age of Horace and was a prudent politician. It is worthy Virgil, marvellously lays hold of this pasof remark, that posterity never gave hin sage in Massillon's Petit Carême :- It the title of virtuous, which was bestowed is no less culpable to fail in truth towards

monarchs than to be wanting in fidelity;.{ with some monks-and all the while the
the same penalty should be imposed on legate was at dinner.
adulation as on revolt."

Such was the origin of the right of the
Popes over Avignon,

I ask your pardon, Father Massillon; but this stroke of yours is very oratorical, Count Raymond, who had submitted very preacher-like, very exaggerated. The to the flagellation in order to preserve his League and the Fronde have, if I am not states, underwent this ignominy to no deceived, done more harm that Quinault's purpose whatever. He had to defend prologues. There is no way of condem- by arms what he had thought to preserve ning Quinault as a rebel. "Est modus by suffering a few stripes; he saw his in rebus," Father Massillon, which is towns laid in ashes, and died in 1213 wanting in all manufacturers of sermons. { amid the vicissitudes of the most sangui

AVIGNON.

AVIGNON and its country are monuments of what the abuse of religion, ambition, knavery, and fanaticism united, can effect. This little country, after a thousand vicissitudes, had, in the twelfth century, passed into the hands of the Counts of Toulouse, descended from Charlemagne by the female side.

nary war.

His son, Raymond VII. was not, like his father, suspected of heresy ; but he was the son of a heretic, and was to be stripped of all his possessions, by virtue of the Decretals; such was the law. The crusade, therefore, was continued against him; he was excommunicated in the churches, on Sundays and holidays, to the sound of bells and with tapers extin

A legate who was in France during the minority of St. Louis, raised tenths there, to maintain this war in Languedoc and Provence. Raymond defended himself with courage; but the heads of the hydra of fanaticism were incessantly reappearing to devour him.

Raymond VI. Count of Toulouse,guished. whose forefathers had been the principal heroes in the crusades, was stripped of his states by a crusade which the Pope stirred up against him. The cause of the crusade was, the desire of having his spoils; the pretext was, that in several of his towns the citizens thought nearly as has been thought for upwards of two hundred years in England, Sweden, Denmark, three-fourths of Switzerland, Holland, and half of Germany.

The Pope at last made peace, because all his money had been expended in war. Raymond VII. came and signed the treaty before the portal of the cathedral of This was hardly a sufficient reason for Paris. He was forced to pay ten thougiving, in the name of God, the states of sand marks of silver to the legate, two the Count of Toulouse to the first occu- thousand to the abbey of Citeaux, five pent, and for devoting to slaughter and hundred to the abbey of Clervaux, a re his subjects, crucifix in hand, and thousand to that of Grand-Selve, and white cross on shoulder. All that is re-three hundred to that of Belleperche-all tated of the most savage people, falls far short of the barbarities committed in this war, called holy. The ridiculous atrocity t some religious ceremonies always accompanied these horrid excesses. It is known that Raymond VI, was dragged to a church of St. Giles's, before a legate, aked to the waist, without hose or sanals, with a rope about his neck, which was held by a deacon, while another deaon flogged him, and a third sung miserere

for the salvation of his soul, as is specified
in the treaty. So it was that the Church
always negociated.

It is very remarkable, that in this do-
cument the Count of Toulouse constantly
puts the legate before the King-"I
swear and promise to the legate and to
the King, faithfully to observe all these
things, and to cause them to be observed
by my vassals and subjects," &c.

This was not all. He ceded to Pope