Neither is it to be thought strange that a
character should have been misunderstood and falsely appreciated for
nearly two thousand years. It happens not uncommonly, especially amongst
an unimaginative people like the Romans, that the characters of men are
ciphers and enigmas to their own age, and are first read and interpreted
by a far distant posterity. Stars are supposed to exist, whose light has
been travelling for many thousands of years without having yet reached our
system; and the eyes are yet unborn upon which their earliest rays will
fall. Men like Mark Anthony, with minds of chaotic composition--light
conflicting with darkness, proportions of colossal grandeur disfigured by
unsymmetrical arrangement, the angelic in close neighborhood with the
brutal--are first read in their true meaning by an age learned in the
philosophy of the human heart. Of this philosophy the Romans had, by the
necessities of education and domestic discipline not less than by original
constitution of mind, the very narrowest visual range. In no literature
whatsoever are so few tolerable notices to be found of any great truths in
Psychology.
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