Of this infinite superiority
some part must be ascribed to his early emancipation from paternal
control. There are very many cases in which, simply from considerations of
sex, a female cannot stand forward as the head of a family, or as its
suitable representative. If they are even ladies paramount, and in
situations of command, they are also women. The staff of authority does
not annihilate their sex; and scruples of female delicacy interfere for
ever to unnerve and emasculate in their hands the sceptre however
otherwise potent. Hence we see, in noble families, the merest boys put
forward to represent the family dignity, as fitter supporters of that
burden than their mature mothers. And of Caesar's mother, though little is
recorded, and that little incidentally, this much at least, we learn--
that, if she looked down upon him with maternal pride and delight, she
looked up to him with female ambition as the re-edifier of her husband's
honors, with reverence as to a column of the Roman grandeur, and with fear
and feminine anxieties as to one whose aspiring spirit carried him but too
prematurely into the fields of adventurous honor.
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