THE JULY PAGEANT. 73 
was not arrayed like one of these.” We turn the pages 
of Pindar, and again the victors in the Olympic games 
are returning home in triumph, bearing the wreath of 
wild olive, having won for themselves and their native 
city an imperishable name. In imagination we may 
stand in the Forum at Rome and see some great pro- 
consul returning victorious from a foreign war :—it may 
be Scipio Africanus fresh from the conquest of Carthage 
after the second Punic war, or A*milius Paullus with 
Perseus, king of Macedon, in his train, or Caius Julius 
Cesar, ‘the laurelled scholar, the sun-bright intellect,” 
“the foremost man of all this world,” celebrating four 
triumphs at once because his life has been too busy to 
celebrate separately his successes in Gaul, in Egypt, in 
Pontus and in Numidia:—they pass in splendor along 
the Sacred Way and up the Sacred Hill, offering in 
the magnificent display of silver and gold and precious 
stones and other treasures of the vanquished lands such 
gorgeous spectacles as the world has rarely witnessed. 
There have been coronation pageants and royal prog- 
resses, not a few, through the streets of capital cities ; 
processions of the elect of a nation, like that of the 
States General of France at the beginning of the Revo- 
lution, so vividly described in Carlyle’s pages, or like 
that, to which no pen but Macaulay’s could do justice, 
at the opening of the High Court of Parliament which 
was to sit in judgment upon Warren Hastings. Yet, 
Io 
