might be called schools of vice. In their justifiable horror at this state of things, the men who carried on the work of these pioneers swung to the opposite extreme and attempted to prevent every kind of intercourse, instead of carefully grouping the prisoners, discouraging vicious talk, and, through the companionship of good persons, permeating the various divisions of the prison with uplifting and educational influences.

The following criticisms of the two systems in vogue were written at a time when they had only recently succeeded in establishing themselves in our English prisons. The first quotation refers to the silent associated system.'

The mind of the prisoner is kept perpetually on the fret by the prohibition of speech, and is drawn . . . to the invention of devices for defeating his overseers, or for carrying on a clandestine communication with his fellow-prisoners, deriving no benefit meanwhile from the offices of religion, but rather converting such offices into an opportunity for eluding the vigilance of the warders, and being still further depraved by frequent punishment for offences of a purely arbitrary character; for, surely, to place a number of social beings in association, and then not only interdict all intercourse between them, but punish such as yield to that most powerful of human impulses-the desire of communing with those with whom we are thrown into connexion-is an act of refined tyranny, that is at once unjust and impossible of being thoroughly carried out.'

The mid-Victorian objection to the solitary system' is formulated thus:

'The separate or cellular system breaks down the mental and bodily health of the prisoners; it forces the mind to be continually brooding over its own guilt, constantly urging the prisoner to contemplate the degradation of his position, and seeking to impress upon him that his crimes have caused him to be excluded from all society. With the better class of criminals. . . it produces not only such a continued sorrow at being cut off from. . . every one but prison officers but such an insatiate yearning to get back to all that is held dear, that the punishment becomes more than natures which are not

Neither Howard nor Mrs Fry approved of the attempts to enforce continual silence or separation upon prisoners.

utterly callous are able to withstand; so that, instead of reforming, it utterly overwhelms and destroys. With more vacant intellects and hardened hearts, it serves to make the prisoners even more unfeeling and unthinking; for sympathy alone develops sympathy, and thought in others is required to bring forth thought in us. . . . This mode of penal discipline cages a man up as if he were some dangerous beast, allowing his den to be entered only by his keeper; and it ends in his becoming as irrational and furious as a beast. . . . The system violates the great social law instituted by the Almighty, and, so working contrary to nature, it is idle to expect any good of it.'

These criticisms are as sound and true to-day as they doubtless were in regard to the prison discipline of the sixties. The tragedy lies in the fact that they awakened but slight response in the minds of the generation to whom they were addressed; and that, for over fifty years since then, the same intolerable features have persisted, and have doubtless resulted in maiming and wrecking thousands of human lives, whose wounds and sores might have been healed by humane treatment. In the upbuilding of a new world out of the ruins of to-day, which is the hope and desire of every patriot, the reform of our prisons will be not the least important part. If the evidence of some of those, who are passing through prisons now, may serve to establish true principles by which these institutions may become schools of reformation instead of places of demoralisation and torture, their imprisonment, whatever its other results, will not have been in vain.

This and the preceding passage are quoted from the section on Prison Discipline in Mayhew's 'Criminal Prisons of London,' a most interesting and elaborate work published in 1862, when the existing prisons at Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Holloway were already built.

STEPHEN HOBHOUSE.

Art. 3.-THE LAST OF THE LATIN HISTORIANS.

1. Ammiani Marcellini Rerum Gestarum libros qui

supersunt recensuit rhythmiceque distinxit Carolus U. Clark. Vol. I, libri xiv-xxv. Berlin: Weidmann, 1910. 2. Die verlorenen Bücher des Ammianus Marcellinus. By Hugo Michael. Breslau: Maruschke, 1880. 3. Ammien Marcellin, sa vie et son œuvre. Gimazane. Toulouse: Chauvin, 1889.

By Jean

4. Die geschichtliche Litteratur über die Römische Kaiserzeit. By H. Peter. Leipzig: Teubner, 1897.

5. The Text Traditions of Ammianus Marcellinus. By C. U. Clark. New Haven, 1904.

6. Ammien Marcellin. By L. Dautremer. Lille, 1899. 7. Studien zu Ammianus Marcellinus. By W. Klein. Leipzig: Weicher, 1914.

A STERN and melancholy interest, hardly to be matched in any other epoch, attaches to the records of the Roman Empire in the fourth century of our era. The old world was passing away in storm and agony, its frontiers assailed, its creeds challenged and perplexed, its social tissue suffering a slow and steady process of degeneration, which the political science of that time might note but was impotent to analyse or to cure. It was an age of bitter factions, when the demise of an emperor gave the signal for turmoil, intrigue or civil war; when, even within the Christian circle, sect contended with sect in savage and unrelenting animosity, and great political interests were often sacrificed to the vile machinations of the palace. And meanwhile the Empire was assaulted on all sides, by the Persians in Mesopotamia, by the Goths in Thrace, by the Germans on the Gaulish frontier -a contest waged with varying fortunes and exhibiting abundant proof that the legions of Rome had lost neither the discipline nor the coolness of their ancient renown, but nevertheless revealing to the understanding eye the ominous spectacle of a weakening defence against an ever-growing momentum of attack.

This, too, is the century which witnessed the codification of the orthodox creed of the Western Church and the expiring effort of paganism to maintain itself as the official religion of the Western world. In the brief

reign of Julian, which occupies a disproportionate space in Gibbon's majestic work and is therefore to Englishmen the most familiar episode of later Roman history, the contest between the Christian religion and a sublimated form of the older beliefs is shown against the sombre background of the German and the Persian wars. The pagan Emperor, fighting against overwhelming spiritual and material forces, dies after a reign of less than two years; and the wheel of fortune swings suddenly round. The worship of the Sun-god is discarded; the Nicene Creed expels the brief and enlightened catechism of the pagan Sallustius; and by the end of the century the official triumph of Christianity is secure.

For twenty-five years of this tormented age we may follow the guidance of a writer, who, though standing outside the Christian fold, was so temperate in spirit and so honourably distinguished for judgment and impartiality that critics have been divided as to the exact shade of his religious opinions. The History of Ammianus Marcellinus begins for us (for the earlier books have been lost) in 353 and ends with the defeat and death of Valens at Adrianople in 378, recounting in whole or in part the reigns of seven Emperors, Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Valentinian I, Gratian and the child Valentinian II. But the original work, which was designed as a continuation of the histories of Tacitus, went back to the death of Nerva (96 A.D.), so that the accident of literary survival has preserved to us, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, only so much of the history as concerns the period of the author's active participation in the public affairs of the Empire. We have no external evidence as to the character of the lost books of Ammianus. Probably Gibbon is right in assuming that the first thirteen books were but 'a superficial epitome of two hundred and fiftyseven years.' It has, however, been argued, from references to the earlier books contained in the surviving fragments and seeming to imply a full treatment of certain topics, that the history was written upon a uniform scale, and that it contained some eighty books, thirty-one of which were devoted to the period with respect to which Ammianus was able to employ ocular and oral testimony. This, however, is an hypothesis entirely unsupported by literary tradition; and, since Ammianus exhibits scant

regard to proportion in those parts of his work which we are enabled to test, we need not be at pains to defend the symmetry of his general design.

The last of the Latin historians was a soldier of Greek speech and lineage who was born about A.D. 332 in the half-Greek, half-Syrian city of Antioch. That Ammianus spoke Greek as his native tongue would be a natural inference from his birthplace, even if Greek modes of speech and thought were not plentifully illustrated in his writings. And it may give matter for surprise that, having been suckled in the speech of Herodotus and Thucydides, Ammianus should have staked his literary reputation upon a work written in a foreign language, over which he never succeeded in obtaining an easy and graceful mastery. Language is a delicate and intricate thing, so delicate and so intricate that only a man with a rare genius for style can hope to win complete purity of expression in a foreign tongue; and, though the gifts of Ammianus were numerous and solid, a sense of style in writing was not among them. He wrote Latin, then, not out of an artistic impulse to practise himself in a new and difficult mode, but because Latin was the official language of the Empire, because it was spoken in the armies and the public offices, because it was the instrument of a public career, and because, through the use of a long line of poets, historians, philosophers and legists, Latin might be regarded as the authentic voice of Roman patriotism itself.

Indeed it is curious to reflect upon the singular power and magnetism which the name and tradition of Rome were still able to exert over the mind of a provincial and critical Greek, some of whose most famous pages are devoted to a delineation of the vices of the Roman capital, to the defeat of Roman armies in Persia and in Thrace, and to the acceptance of an ignominious peace at the hands of victorious Orientals. Ammianus paints the decadence of Rome with every hue of elaborate contempt; he shows us Roman society eaten out to the core by the vermin of sloth, luxury and vice. He notes the shameful rule of the eunuch and the parasite, the breakdown of criminal justice, the perennial curse of calumny and terrorism, with its melancholy tale of