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You will not then, to be sure, rank with the Hannibals, the Tamerlanes, or the Cæsars; but you may attain a place with Demosthenes, who was more dreaded by Philip of Macedon than an army of soldiers." "Or Cicero," remarked Becker, "who preserved his country from the rapacity of Cataline." "Or Peter the Hermit," remarked Frank, "who by his eloquence roused Europe against the Saracens."
In Jonson's hands, the subject continues history, without becoming poetry; the political events which he has described have more the appearance of a business than an action. Cataline and Sejanus are solid dramatic studies after Sallust and Cicero, after Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, and others; and that is the best which we can say of them.
But Servius Tullius caused more horrid ones to be dug under ground for state criminals, as if such prisoners were not those who deserve most consideration, since their errors might be united with sincerity. Jugurtha and the accomplices of Cataline perished in these prisons. It is also said that St Peter and St Paul have been incarcerated in them.
'We shall no more admire at the proceedings of Cataline and Tiberius, when we know the one was actuated by a cruel jealousy; the other by a furious ambition; for the actions of men follow their passions as naturally as light does heat, or as any other effect flows from its cause; reason must be employed in adjusting the passions, but they must ever remain the principles of action.
For as we turned from a side lane into the Wicked street that scales the summit of the Esquiline, my eye caught something lurking in the dark shadow cast over an angle of the wall by a large cypress. I seized the arm of Cassius, to check his speech"— "Ha! did the fat idiot speak?—what said he?" interrupted Cataline. "Nothing," replied the other, "nothing, at least, of any moment.
But now they crossed the broad Virbian street. The slave, distinctly visible for such, as he glanced by a brightly decorated shrine girt by so many brilliant lamps as shewed its tenant idol to have no lack of worshippers, darted up a small street leading directly towards the Esquiline. "Now! now!" lisped Cataline between his hard-set teeth, "now he is mine, past rescue!"
Ever espying whom he might attach to his party by operating on his passions, his prejudices, his weakness, or his pride; a most sagacious judge of human nature, reading the character of every man as it were in a written book, Cataline had long before remarked young Arvina.
Other churches too there are in Pistoja: S. Piero Maggiore, where, as in Florence, so here, the Bishop, coming to the city, was wedded in a lovely symbol to the Benedictine Abbess there too are the works of Maestro Bono the sculptor; S. Salvadore, which stands in the place where, as it is said, they buried Cataline; S. Domenico, where you may find the beautiful tombs of Andrea Franchi and of Filippo Lazzeri the humanist this made by Rossellino in 1494.
On his entrance, the senators near whom he attempted to seal himself, quitting their places, left him quite alone. On his arrival, he assumed all the insignia of a supreme magistrate being preceded by lictors carrying the axes and fasces. Cataline himself, finding his affairs desperate, threw himself into the midst of the enemy, and there found the death he sought.
He told of his first meeting with Cataline upon the Cælian; of his visit to Cicero; of his strange conversation with the cutler Volero; of his second encounter with the traitor in the field of Mars, not omitting the careless accident by which he revealed to him Volero’s recognition of the weapon.
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