The Old Roman World [pp. 751-757]

The Old Romani World.
THE OLD ROMAN WORLD.*
DID Doctor Lord dream that the
world would pronounce him immortal for having formed an ill-assorted
museum of effete ideas gathered from
all the kingdoms of thought? While
he was writing the sheets of The Old
Roman World, was he thinking of a
political world, or an ecclesiastical
world, or a literary world, or a military world, or conjuring up a visionary
world? Did he base his claims to
an imperishable name on his faculty
to extract philosophical truth from
historical facts, or on his powers of
describing facts and communicating
truths so as to be useful to his fellowman, or on his irrepressible fluency
in saying again and again, what had
been better said again and again by
others before? Did he intend to
write a book; or are the sixteen chapters of his volume sixteen independent and unrelated pamphlets, or
sixteen stump speeches, or sixteen
lectures, or sixteen spiritualistic effusions in a meandering mood of mind?
Did he write to instruct the student, or amuse the indolent, or delight the world, or add to the lore of
the learned? Did he ever read, in
the original languages, the historians,
the philosophers, the critics, the poets,
the scientific writers on whose minds
and merits he wrote; or has he seen
them only as in a mirror, by means
of encyclopedian dissertations, handbooks, and such second-hand depositories? Did he think that the world
would regard his compilations as a
faithful reflector of ancient minds and
ancient life?
There is, however, in Dr. Lord's
* The Old Roaten Vorld-: the Grandeur antd
Faiiure of its Civilization. By John Lord, LL.D.
New York: Charles Scribner & Co. I867.
Old Roman World food for thought.
No one denies the importance of the
high and momentous questions connected with the Roman name. It is
an unquestionable fact that, in the history of the human race, the Romans occupythe mostprominentposition. To
the eyes of the historian, the Roman
world is, amongst the nations of bygone centuries, what, to the eyes of
the astronomer, the sun is amongst
the heavenly bodies. The generative causes of that outshining social
edifice have occupied the most. spleindid intellects in past ages, and have
been analyzed anew in our day, according to his generalization, by Dr.
Lord. To his mind it seems that
the nations of the earth were welded
into one body by the superior military mechanism of the Romans, and
that the impaired efficiency of this
military machinery, together with a
certain mysterious fatality, produced
the disintegration of the Roman
empire, by destroying the cohesive
qualities of Roman rule. Such
is the pervading idea of his chapters. We know that vast empires
have been born of the sword; but
we haive yet to learn that an empire
embracing the nations, religions, and
languages of the earth, could have
been founded on, and conserved
for centuries by, military mechanism. The Romans, like Attila,
or Genghis Khan, or Alexander, or
Sesostris, might have gone forth,
and, either by bravery, or superior
tactics, or vast levied armies, have
overrun the nations of the earth;
but military mechanism could never
have raised and sustained through
a long lapse of ages a mighty empire built on vanquished peoples.
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