Autobiographical Sketches | Page 5

content with exposing the imposture,
I go on, and attempt to show in what real circumstances, fraudulently
disguised, it might naturally have arisen. In the real circumstances of
the Christian church, when struggling with Jewish persecution at some
period of the generation between the crucifixion and the siege of
Jerusalem, arose probably that secret defensive society of Christians
which suggested to Josephus his knavish forgery. We must remember
that Josephus did not write until after the great ruins effected by the
siege; that he wrote at Rome, far removed from the criticism of those
survivors who could have exposed, or had a motive for exposing, his
malicious frauds; and, finally, that he wrote under the patronage of the
Flavian family: by his sycophancy he had won their protection, which
would have overawed any Christian whatever from coming forward to
unmask him, in the very improbable case of a work so large, costly, and,
by its title, merely archaeological, finding its way, at such a period, into
the hands of any poor hunted Christian. [4]
2. THE CAESARS.--This, though written hastily, and in a situation
where I had no aid from books, is yet far from being what some people
have supposed it--a simple recapitulation, or _resumé_, of the Roman
imperatorial history. It moves rapidly over the ground, but still with an
exploring eye, carried right and left into the deep shades that have
gathered so thickly over the one solitary road [5] traversing that part of

history. Glimpses of moral truth, or suggestions of what may lead to it;
indications of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural
solutions of such difficulties,--these are what this essay offers. It was
meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a
vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme,
sometimes it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious
title. Still I felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a
valuation: derelicts they were, not in the sense of things willfully
abandoned by my predecessors on that road, but in the sense of things
blindly overlooked. And, summing up in one word the pretensions of
this particular essay, I will venture to claim for it so much, at least, of
originality as ought not to have been left open to any body in the
nineteenth century.
3. CICERO.--This is not, as might be imagined, any literary valuation
of Cicero; it is a new reading of Roman history in the most dreadful
and comprehensive of her convulsions, in that final stage of her
transmutations to which Cicero was himself a party--and, as I maintain,
a most selfish and unpatriotic party. He was governed in one half by his
own private interest as a novus homo dependent upon a wicked
oligarchy, and in the other half by his blind hatred of Caesar; the
grandeur of whose nature he could not comprehend, and the real
patriotism of whose policy could never be appreciated by one bribed to
a selfish course. The great mob of historians have but one way of
constructing the great events of this era--they succeed to it as to an
inheritance, and chiefly under the misleading of that prestige which is
attached to the name of Cicero; on which account it was that I gave this
title to my essay. Seven years after it was published, this essay, slight
and imperfectly developed as is the exposition of its parts, began to
receive some public countenance.
I was going on to abstract the principle involved in some other essays.
But I forbear. These specimens are sufficient for the purpose of
informing the reader that I do not write without a thoughtful
consideration of my subject; and also, that to think reasonably upon any
question has never been allowed by me as a sufficient ground for
writing upon it, unless I believed myself able to offer some
considerable novelty. Generally I claim (not arrogantly, but with
firmness) the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors or to

injurious limitations of the truth.
Finally, as a third class, and, in virtue of their aim, as a far higher class
of compositions included in the American collection, I rank The
Confessions of an Opium Eater, and also (but more emphatically) the
Suspiria de Profundis. On these, as modes of impassioned prose
ranging under no precedents that I am aware of in any literature, it is
much more difficult to speak justly, whether in a hostile or a friendly
character. As yet, neither of these two works has ever received the least
degree of that correction and pruning which both require so extensively;
and of the Suspiria, not more than perhaps one third has yet been
printed. When both have been fully revised, I shall feel myself entitled
to ask for a