Meantime it will be proper, after thus briefly throwing our eyes over the
monstrous atrocities of the early Caesars, to spend a few lines in
examining their origin, and the circumstances which favored their growth.
For a mere hunter after hidden or forgotten singularities; a lover on
their own account of all strange perversities and freaks of nature,
whether in action, taste, or opinion; for a collector and amateur of
misgrowths and abortions; for a Suetonius, in short, it may be quite
enough to state and to arrange his cabinet of specimens from the
marvellous in human nature. But certainly in modern times, any historian,
however little affecting the praise of a philosophic investigator, would
feel himself called upon to remove a little the taint of the miraculous
and preternatural which adheres to such anecdotes, by entering into the
psychological grounds of their possibility; whether lying in any
peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models,
corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken
separately, and out of their natural connection with their explanatory
causes, are apt rather to startle and revolt the feelings of sober
thinkers.
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