wonderful power to express the ideas that belong to it, under modern forms. These Lays, ever since their first appearance, have held one of the highest places in the popular estimation: and their position in English literature may be considered as permanently fixed. There are many, probably, who will not go so far as Macaulay, in adopting the views of Niebuhr and his school, with regard to the history of the Kings of Rome. A reaction has already commenced against the historical scepticism for which German scholarship has been celebrated. Wolf's Homeric theory must be abandoned as untenable, in the present state of philological investigation. The existence of numerous popular ballads, however, before the Iliad and Odyssey, embodying the traditions and legends which the great Ionian poet made the basis of his Epics, must still be admitted. The outlines of the early history of Rome, will probably be restored to their place in the common belief: but criticism has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that many of the details so picturesquely narrated by Livy, are the creation of ballad-singers, working out the popular legends upon a groundplan of truth.

These legends Mr. Macaulay has employed with extraordinary skill and power. He has produced a series of Lays which will live as long as Roman History shall be read, and the heroic spirit of the genuine epic ballad shall stir the soul of the reader like the sound of a trumpet.

To these various claims to public admiration, Mr. Macaulay has still added the honors of a most successful writer of History. In this grave department of literature, he combines with the fervid imagination which makes him the most picturesque of narrators, a capacity for laborious research scarcely inferior to that of Gibbon. He clothes the past with the freshness and life of the present, and makes political history not only profoundly instructive, but as entertaining and attractive as the best of romances.

C. C. F.

CAMBRIDGE, JUNE, 1856.

PREFACE.

THAT What is called the history of the Kings and early Consuls of Rome is to a great extent fabulous, few scholars have, since the time of Beaufort, ventured to deny. It is certain that, more than three hundred and sixty years after the date ordinarily assigned for the foundation of the city, the public records were, with scarcely an exception, destroyed by the Gauls. It is certain that the oldest annals of the commonwealth were compiled more than a century and a half after this destruction of the records. It is certain, therefore, that the great Latin writers of the Augustan age did not possess those materials, without which a trustworthy account of the infancy of the republic could not possibly be framed. Those writers own, indeed, that the chronicles to which they had access were filled with battles that were never fought, and Consuls that were never inaugurated; and we have

abundant proof that, in these chronicles, events of the greatest importance, such as the issue of the war with Porsena, and the issue of the war with Brennus, were grossly misrepresented. Under these circumstances a wise man will look with great suspicion on the legend which has come down to us. He will perhaps be inclined to regard the princes who are said to have founded the civil and religious institutions of Rome, the son of Mars, and the husband of Egeria, as mere mythological personages, of the same class with Perseus and Ixion. As he draws nearer and nearer to the confines of authentic history, he will become less and less hard of belief. He will admit that the most important parts of the narrative have some foundation in truth. But he will distrust almost all the details, not only because they seldom rest on any solid evidence, but also because he will constantly detect in them, even when they are within the limits of physical possibility, that peculiar character, more easily understood than defined, which distinguishes the creations of the imagination from the realities of the world in which we live.

The early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of