THE CINCINNATUS. 



Dol. 1. JANUARY 1, 1856. 5fo. 1. 



CiiuiitnatHS. 



At a midniglit hour, two thousand and three hundred and eleven 

 years ago, the streets of sleeping Eome were echoing the clattering 

 foot-falls of a panting steed, as his wearied rider urged him sternly on 

 beyond the Palatine, beyond the Capitoline, and up the Quirinal hill, 

 towards the guarded portals of the princely house of Quintius Fabius. 

 Dismounting here, the knightly horseman answered the sentry's chal- 

 lenge by a hasty countersign ; and, declaring that his errand concerned 

 the safety of the Commonwealth, demanded instant speech with the 

 noble Fabius ; whereupon he was forthwith ushered in, and conducted 

 by a freedman to the audience chamber of the Eoman Consul. Full 

 soon another courier, mounted on the fleetest horse, issued from the 

 Fabian gate, and sped him in the darkness through city and across 

 plain toward the army of Caius Nautius, then encamped in the adjacent 

 country of the Sabines. Lictors were seen passing rapidly to bear 

 official summons to the masters of patrician mansions, who in turn hur- 

 riedly followed the fasces to the Forum. The Senate was thus hastily 

 convened ; the city was aroused ; and rumor ran babbling from street 

 to street, from house to house, proclaiming that danger was hovering 

 over the city of Kome, 



Two thousand and three hundred and eleven years ago, as the 

 morning sun of a spring-time day was just peeping over the Alban Hills 

 — as his earliest beams were glancing from the towers and turrets of the 

 Palatine and Arentine, and bathing the broad Campagna in a flood of 

 golden light, — across the Tiber, over against the city, there stood the 

 noble form of "the noblest Ptoman of them all." Fifty years had but 



VOL. I., NO. I. — 1. 



