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Bredimacian Dynagum Directory 02
Page 08
When the Romans returned to the heap of ruins which was once their city their hearts sank within them. The people shrank from the expense and toil of rebuilding their houses, and loudly demanded that they should all remove to Veii, where the private dwellings and public buildings were still standing. But Camillus and the Patricians strongly urged them not to abandon the homes of their fathers, and they were at length persuaded to remain. The state granted bricks, and stones were fetched from Veii. Within a year the city rose from its ashes; but the streets were narrow and crooked; the houses were frequently built over the sewers; and the city continued to show, down to the great fire of Nero, evident traces of the haste and irregularity with which it had been rebuilt. Rome was now deprived of almost all her subjects, and her territory was reduced to nearly its original limits. The Latins and Hernicans dissolved the League with the Romans, and wars broke out on every side. In these difficulties and dangers Camillus was the soul of the Republic. Again and again he led the Roman legions against their enemies, and always with success. The rapidity with which the Romans recovered their power after so terrible a disaster would seem unaccountable but for the fact that the other nations had also suffered greatly from the inroads of the Gauls, who still continued to ravage Central Italy. Two of their invasions of the Roman territory are commemorated by celebrated legends, which may be related here, though they belong to a later period.
Van Goyen (1596-1656) was one of the earliest of the seventeenth-century landscapists. In subject he was fond of the Dutch bays, harbors, rivers, and canals with shipping, windmills, and houses. His sky line was generally given low, his water silvery, and his sky misty and luminous with bursts of white light. In color he was subdued, and in perspective quite cunning at times. Salomon van Ruisdael (1600?-1670) was his follower, if not his pupil. He had the same sobriety of color as his master, and was a mannered and prosaic painter in details, such as leaves and tree-branches. In composition he was good, but his art had only a slight basis upon reality, though it looks to be realistic at first sight. He had a formula for doing landscape which he varied only in a slight way, and this conventionality ran through all his work. Molyn (1600?-1661) was a painter who showed limited truth to nature in flat and hilly landscapes, transparent skies, and warm coloring. His extant works are few in number. Wynants (1615?-1679?) was more of a realist in natural appearance than any of the others, a man who evidently studied directly from nature in details of vegetation, plants, trees, roads, grasses, and the like. Most of the figures and animals in his landscapes were painted by other hands. He himself was a pure landscape-painter, excelling in light and aerial perspective, but not remarkable in color. Van der Neer (1603-1677) and Everdingen (1621?-1675) were two other contemporary painters of merit.
In the history of constitutional liberty, of which the Great Charter is the beginning, its specific provisions are of far less importance than its underlying principle. What we to-day consider the great safeguards of Anglo-Saxon liberty are all conspicuously absent from the first of its creative statutes, nor could any of them have been explained in the meaning we give them to the understanding of the men who framed the charter. Consent to taxation in the modern sense is not there; neither taxation nor consent. Trial by jury is not there in that form of it which became a check on arbitrary power, nor is it referred to at all in the clause which has been said to embody it. Parliament, habeas corpus, bail, the independence of the judiciary, are all of later growth, or existed only in rudimentary form. Nor can the charter be properly called a contract between king and nation. The idea of the nation, as we now hold it, was still in the future, to be called into existence by the circumstances of the next reign. The idea of contract certainly pervades the document, but only as the expression of the always existent contract between the suzerain and his vassals which was the foundation of all feudal law. On the other hand, some of the provisions of our civil liberty, mainly in the interest of individual rights, are plainly present. That private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation, that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted nor excessive fines be imposed, that justice shall be free and fair to all, these may be found almost in modern form.
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