is what we gather from his treatise, he must have wholly failed to gauge the mind of a man of trained reason and thoughtful intellect like Julian. tation of the Asiatic Courts" (as Gibbon calls it), of which Diocletian had set the first example. Constantius, borne through Rome in a lofty car, paraded before Roman eyes all the "barbaric pearl and gold" which the gorgeous East showers on her kings; and around him gathered the eunuchs of his palace, his magnificently equipped body-guards, and all the other accessories of a seraglio government. Nor was the Roman army less strange to the citizens than the habits of the Court. Long before this, the men who bore the Roman eagles over the world had ceased for the most part to be genuine Romans. Even in the days of Augustus they were so habitually drawn from the neighbouring provinces of Italy, that Marsus et Appulus in Horace's verse was at once understood as a natural description of the Roman soldiery. But at the time of which we are speaking Rome had gone much farther afield for her military defenders. The legions had been filled with Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons, and still more recently with Germans, Goths, and Scythians. These soldiers, while they rapidly acquired the Roman arts, learned nothing of Roman feeling, except fidelity to their standards. We can quite believe, indeed, that there was no inconsiderable element of romance in Julian's temperament. He emerged on the world from the seclusion in which his boyhood had been passed, and found all his dreams of the great Rome whose story he had studied confronted with the reality of that Decline which was tending to her Fall. It was now nearly three centuries and a half since the Roman eagles, advancing for eight hundred years, had turned back before Arminius and his Germans, and never faced northward again. Sacked and ruined lie the once prosperous Rhenish cities, for all those mighty ramparts which the Roman reared, and against which the German even in our time still builds his houses. The camp-fires of the barbarian forays glare in the green waters of the great river. The Rhætian Alps now constitute the virtual boundary of the Roman Empire; and from beyond their passes not yet made ready for Alaric and Attila-rises ever and anon the wild barritus of some hitherto unknown tribe, startling the Roman outposts with the token of a new enemy. But it was not in the outward strength of the Empire alone that decay was to be seen. Even then Julian might have said in Latin what with which, probably, he had never quite was said centuries later in Italian: Roma, lost his sympathy. He was a close stuRoma, non è più come era prima. The city dent, thanks to the strict seclusion to was ceasing to be the terrarum Dea genti- which the jealousy of Constantius conumque the centre of the world's govern- signed his youth. He pondered over the ment. A new capital of the world had pages of Livy and the other chroniclers arisen by the shores of the Bosphorus, who related the old glories of Roman hisand the Imperial rule was assuming a new tory. He remembered how piously those character in conformity with the change historians had always associated the triin its local administration. When Con- umphs recorded by them with the favourstantius made his public entry into Rome ing care of the ancient Roman divinities A.D. 357, a period of thirty-two years had the "gods of our Fathers and of the elapsed since Rome had witnessed the Soil," invoked in Virgil's verse as keeping presence of an Emperor in her streets; ward over "Etruscan Tiber and the and the citizens who thronged to witness palaces of Rome." He saw, that as their the event were amazed at the changes worship was fading from the "moveless which had passed on the Imperial Court. rock of the Capitol " and all the sanctuaThe Roman simplicity of the earlier Em-ries which it overlooked, so the glory of perors, who had borrowed their purple Rome was departing. At least, there from the old badge of republican magistra- was something generous in the enthusiasm cy, had been replaced by the "stately affec- which urged the thoughtful boy to dream All this decay Julian would note, and would remark that it was coincident with the repudiation of those religious usages of efforts which might yet roll back the ler coming near us, and none of those tide of time, which might avail to build whom we had known before being allowed again the high places that had been trodden down, and reconcile those old sanctities with the life and thought of a younger world. to visit us? So we passed our time, shut out from all liberal education and from all the generous training appurtenant to honourable families, making companions of Julian has told us something, though our own slaves in our exercises, for no not much, of those early years of his. comrades of our own age and rank ever Assuredly his experience at that time was approached us." Julian speaks bitterly not such as was likely to impress him in on this subject, having regard to the great favour of the new religion in its struggle importance which the Greeks and Romans against the old. The history of Con- always attached to the association of stantine's family is not one which does æquales as an element in a young man's much honour to the first Imperial house training. But it must not be supposed which professed the Christian faith. When that the education of the two princes was Julian ascended the throne he was the last of that numerous band of princes who had sprung from the father of Constantine. The jealous timidity of Constantine himself had been wrought upon (as far as we can gather from historical testimony) to bring about the destruction of his eldest son Crispus and his nephew Licinius. After the death of Constantine came that frightful massacre of eleven princes of the Imperial house which some historians charge to the violent passions of the soldiery, but which Julian himself fully believed to be a crime for which his cousin Constantius was more particularly responsible than any one beside. When that slaughter of the princes took place, Gallus was about twelve and his half-brother Julian six years old. Let us hope that it was some humanity in Constantius which prompted him to spare these children. At all events, their lives were for the present important as regarded the succession of his dynasty. Whether in fear for them or in fear of them, the boys were placed under close surveillance. "We were shut up," says Julian, "in some country place or other in Cappadocia, where they suffered no one to come near neglected in the ordinary sense of the He some tradition in Julian's time, which connected with the royal race of Persia such a "happy valley" as that which we have since heard of through Milton and Johnson -"Where Abassin kings their issue guard." others (for with that I had nothing to do), but than my own natural self. And I yielded to his persuasions; and now I am unable to mend my ways." 66 It can ing. Had Julian, like Mary Tudor, re-persuaded me that if I were to follow in collections of a happier childhood, which all things those exemplars of his I should would further bind him to this service? become a better man - not perhaps than It is likely enough. No doubt his mother Basilina had openly conformed to the faith of the Imperial family. But it may easily be guessed, that in the newly Christianized Court of Constantine there would It is evident from this and similar pasbe many, especially among the women, sages, that the moral lessons which the who would still keep a reverence for the young Julian learned from Mardonius apold names which were among the solemn pealed for their authority mainly to the recollections of their childhood. Basilina Greek philosophers. Now it was part of died shortly after the coup d'état in which the teaching of these same philosophers, her husband fell. But she was able, it more particularly of Socrates and Plato, seems, to secure for her son, in his cap- to enjoin on their followers the pious obtivity, the attendance of the eunuch Mar- servance of all those sacred usages which donius, who had watched over her own their fathers had cherished. Socrates himearly years, and had taught her to love self, no doubt, in those last words of his, the verses of the great Greek poets. Of "O Crito, we have to offer a cock to this man Julian always speaks with the Esculapius," reverted to his old fancy for most affectionate regard; more particu- speaking in parables, and wished to illuslarly in a passage of the Misopogon. He trate his view of death as a recovery from is offering his ironical excuses to the gay the long sickness of life. But he also, we people of Antioch- the Vienna of the may easily suppose, meant his words to be older world- for that he loves the lore of taken literally, and intended the sacrifice the Greek sages better than those maxims to be actually offered. At all events we of "live while you live," which were so know, from the testimony of his disciple practically followed in and around the Xenophon, how careful he was in rendergroves of Daphne for that Homer's ing the customary worship to the divinities pages, as he turns them over in his soli- acknowledged by his country. tary study, bring before him the harpings of Phemius, the song of Demodocus, the dancers whose twinkling feet amazed Ulysses, the horses of Eumelus straining in the race, all with a more vivid delight than he could feel in the shows of the theatres and the hippodrome of the Syrian capital. "This perverted judgment of mine," he says, in his bantering way, "is all owing to the old man who led my unsuspecting youth astray. Do you wish," he proceeds, "that I should tell you the name of this guardian of my childhood, and what nationality he boasted when he taught me these things? A very barbarian he, by the gods and goddesses! -a Scythian by nationality, and a namesake of him who prompted Xerxes to make war against Greece. He, as he led me to the teachers of my boyhood, pressed on my thoughts, in regard of these things, but one way neither caring himself to know, nor suffering me to diverge into any other. But when you join his name with my reproach, as well as you may, consider that he had been himself beguiled by othersmen whose names you have often heard citied with derision- Plato, and Socrates, and Theophrastus. These men and others like them had so wrought on the foolish disposition of the old fellow, that when he found me a youth and a lover of study, he not be supposed that Mardonius, in turning over the roll which contained the wisdom of Plato, would omit to point his pupil's attention to that earnest seeking after a personal God which is so eminently characteristic of Plato's writings, and in which he always recognized the humble practice of the popular religion as no less needful a help than the deepest enquiries of philosophy. Julian himself, as bearing an imaginative spirit, would be naturally open to the influences of that old Sabean reverence which most likely informed the Asiatic theology of Mardonius; and such influences might well be potent in the loneliness of his Cappadocian seclusion. In his oration in honour of the Sun he says: "I have been all through my life a vassal of the Sun-king, for even as a child there came upon me a strange yearning love of the god's radiancy; and in those early days I used to be so raised out of my own being by the heavenly light, that I not only strove earnestly to gaze on the sun's face itself, but when the nights were cloudless I would wander forth and become lost to all things save only the glory of the heavens; so that I was at such times wholly unconscious of what any one might say to me, or of what I myself was doing." We have here an interesting and truthful picture of the imaginative boy whose soul 66 He had been imbued from his earliest thought | Julian himself speaks to this same effect with the spirit of oriental religion, such when, in the Epistle to the people of a spirit as the patriarch spoke of in its Alexandria, he is expostulating with them workings on the dwellers in Arabian soli- on their readiness to embrace Christianity, tudes, who "behold the sun when it shin- and exclaims: Listen to me, for I myself eth, and the moon walking in brightness; travelled by this path up to the twentieth and the heart is secretly lifted up, and year of my life." All this, however, is the mouth kisseth the hand." Julian, quite consistent with the inference which however, earnestly endeavours to show, in we have drawn from the circumstances of the oration to which we have referred, Julian's early life-that his sympathies that in his mind, at least, the Sun-wor- were with heathenism all along. ship was no mere Sabeism of the vulgar never speaks, as far as we are aware, type. He insisted that the Sun was of any epoch in his life connected with a worthy of worship, as being the outward change of belief; a topic which converts, and visible manifestation of an unseen in the strict sense of the word, are generdivinity, only to be apprehended by the ally eager to dwell upon. We find, almost mind; a divinity who was, in his turn, as soon as he became his own master, at an emanation from the one great Source all events when the dignity of Cæsar was of all things. conferred on him by Constantine, that he had fully chosen his form of religious belief and was engaged, though secretly, in the observance of the Pagan rites. We have dwelt on these traces of Julian's early years for the purpose of showing how far they suggest the probability, at least, that his religious feelings We need not recapitulate in detail the were drawn rather in the direction of the more patent facts of Julian's public life. old heathenism than of the lessons which The exigencies of dynastic policy, consehe received from Eusebius; and that quent on Constantius' want of heirs, inconsequently the appellation of Apostata, duced that Emperor to withdraw Gallus which subsequent times fastened upon from his retirement and to invest him him, was hardly applicable to his case. It with the title and dignity of Cæsar, which is true, no doubt, that Julian was looked in those days implied not only the next upon by his contemporaries as having succession to the Imperial purple, but the been unequivocally a Christian at this actual military command and vice-royalty period of his life. Cyril of Alexandria, in over such part of the empire as might be that elaborate work of his, Contra Julia-placed in his charge. In the case of Galnum, expresses the general belief on this lus this share comprehended the eastern subject, though rather in a vague way: provinces, and the young Cæsar fixed the "Before the period of his sovereignty," he seat of his administration at Antioch. says, "he was accounted in the number of This change in the life of the brothers the believers; he was thought worthy of took place A.D. 351, when Julian was holy baptism, and was instructed in the twenty years old. Gallus seems to have sacred books. But by some means or exerted himself to procure additional libother, foul and superstitious men having erty for his half-brother, who spent this become known to him entangled him in period of his life in various places of Ionia the speculations which led to his apostasy. and Bithynia. But the time of Gallus' And so having taken Satan as their fel-prosperity was short; his own disposition low-soldier on this enterprise, they drew prompted him to deeds of rashness and him aside to the customs of the Greeks, violence, and his wife, whom the contemand at last made him a vassal of unclean porary historian Ammianus Marcellinus spirits, who had been brought up among describes as "rather a fury than a woholy churches and monasteries. Aye, man," is said to have urged him forward 'evil communications corrupt good manners,' as says the all-wise Paul." If the good Archbishop had been less bitterly prejudiced against the "customs of the Greeks," he might have learned that St. Paul himself was here quoting Menander, and not using his own words. However, this passage of Cyril merely amounts to a statement of that which we know already, that Julian was ostensibly brought up in the profession of Christianity and fully instructed in its doctrines; and indeed in his passionate moods, the result of his career being, that by an Imperial mandate he was beheaded in prison, three years after his exaltation to the dignity of Cæsar. Julian generously endeavours to excuse the violence of his brother; urging that his rustic and uncouth training would naturally bring about a corresponding character in his behaviour in public affairs and that the blame of his deficiencies rested with those who had interfered to abridge his education. He also dwells bit Among those young men of his own age who resorted to Athens at the same time with Julian, taking part (as St. Paul had done before them) in those 2oyidia, or disputations, which Julian praises as the best method of training the reason, were Gregory and Basil, afterwards Saints, and conspicuous among the noble Christian Bishops terly on the fact of Gallus' execution with- | spirit that he addressed himself eagerly to out trial; rather a curious ground of com- the studies of the place, and it may well plaint in the face of all those bloody pre- be believed that the footsteps of Socrates cedents which had stained the annals of by Ilissus' banks were holy ground for Imperial Rome, and strongly exemplifying him. In a subsequent letter to two of his that reverence for law which Julian had companions of this time, whom he adintuitively drawn from his studies in the dresses as his class-fellows (ovμpornraí) he history of the old Republic, and by which sorrowfully complains of his separation in after times, his own principles of Gov- from their pursuits. "To follow philosoernment were so eminently distinguished. phy and to have nothing else to do," he The fall of Gallus, certainly not alto- says, "is of all boons the most delightful, gether undeserved on his part, marked a and the most beneficial to men. It is now very critical period in Julian's life. The more than four years since we were sepaEmperor's thoughts naturally turned to rated: what would I not give, Eumenius the only surviving male scion of his dy- and Pharianus, to talk over with you the nasty, but it was at first rather with the progress that you will have made in this suspicion attaching to a possible avenger period. For myself, I am so utterly barof Gallus' blood than with the hopes be- barized by the scenes around me" (he is longing to an heir of the Imperial house. no doubt writing from the seat of his govThere were not wanting among his cour- ernment in Gaul), "that it is a wonder if tiers those who strove to aggravate this I can even speak Greek.” jealous alarm. In this undecided state he kept Julian about his Court for some months, carrying him with his retinue from place to place, but for the most part avoiding all personal communication with him. At this time it was that Julian first experienced the benefits of the friendship of Eusebia, the wife of Constantius. The oration which Julian composed in honour of this Princess and her virtues is among Who mouthed grandly the last Greek. the most earnest and eloquent of his writings. Unless," he says in the Epistle to Both were, as there is reason to believe, the Athenians, "some one of the gods, on terms of familiar intercourse with their who willed my preservation, had procured fellow-student of the Imperial house. In for me the kindness of the Emperor's wife after years, Julian says, writing to Basil, Eusebia, a lady as good as she was beauti-"For all that you say against me, I do not ful, assuredly I should never have escaped part with those feelings which you and I his hands.' It was through the good of- in our youth entertained for each other." fices of Eusebia that Julian was at length set free from this painful and hazardons position, and enabled to fulfil the wish which he had long cherished, of going to study at Athens. He was twenty-four years of age when he set foot in the groves of the Lyceum, the Porch frescoed with Persian battles, and other spots consecrated by the old wisdom and eloquence of sages whose words had charmed his boyish thought. Athens was still the University of the world, and we may easily imagine the enthusiasm with which a spirit like Julian's would seize upon the various associations of the place-intellectual, imaginative, and religious. He had refused to accept the manifestation of that which Plato had vaguely longed for, a divine power making known to men the way of life; and to him Plato's philosophy seemed capable, and abundantly capable, hath in training!" His description of of solving and satisfying all the obstinate Julian's personal appearance and bearing questionings of the soul. It was in this at this time, is assuredly not flattering: 66 And Basil, on his part, assures his Imperial correspondent that he has not forgotten "how we studied together the sacred and noblest literature, the God-inspired scriptures." He says this sadly, in allusion to the character which all the Christian Fathers naturally fixed upon Julian, that of a renegade from their faith. And the regard which Basil may be supposed to have entertained for Julian, would account for the silence generally observed respecting that Emperor and his doings, throughout the various works of Basil which remain to us. Gregory is not so recticent, and loses no opportunity of putting on record his abhorrence of the Apostate. He takes credit to himself for a sort of prophetical foresight, in exclaiming on their first acquaintance, Οἷον κακὸν ἡ Ρωμαί wv rpÉDEL· "what a bane the Roman school |