Hence it was, and from the prudence of Augustus acting through a
very long reign, sustained at no very distant interval by the personal
inspection and revisions of Hadrian, that for some time the Roman power
seemed to be stationary. What else could be expected? The mere strength of
the impetus derived from the republican institutions, could not but
propagate itself, and cause even a motion in advance, for some time after
those institutions had themselves given way. And besides the military
institutions survived all others; and the army continued very much the
same in its discipline and composition, long after Rome and all its civic
institutions had bent before an utter revolution. It was very possible
even that emperors should have arisen with martial propensities, and
talents capable of masking, for many years, by specious but transitory
conquests, the causes that were silently sapping the foundations of Roman
supremacy; and thus by accidents of personal character and taste, an
empire might even have expanded itself in appearance, which, by all its
permanent and real tendencies, was even then shrinking within narrower
limits, and travelling downwards to dissolution.
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