Note 19 — THACKERAY’S LECTURES—SWIFT.

It is curious this twofold character of Tiberius—surprising that historians should have credited this single existence of a civilised cannibal—this recorded “eater of human flesh, and drinker of human blood.” The learned writer of this volume on Tiberius, with truthful scrutiny, sifts every evidence, weighs testimony against testimony, and testimony of the same authority against itself, and after patient investigation concludes, as the reasonable solution of the historical enigma, that Tiberius was not only “of all kings or autocrats the most venerable,” but that he was, “in the fourteenth year of his reign, a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ,” and, “during the last eight years of his reign, the nursing-father of the infant Catholic Church.” It will be readily perceived that the supposition of Tiberius being a Christian, at a time when Christianity was universally held to be an odious and justly-persecuted superstition, must have presented, through known facts and rumours, to the world at large, and to the philosophic minds of historians in particular, an idea of human character so novel and so confused, as to be, in the absence of a clue, and a test which they could not admit, altogether incomprehensible. What could they do with the sacramental fact—the eating human flesh and drinking human blood, by one known for his abstemiousness?

The sacramental fact discovered, and undeniable, yet not known as the sacramental fact, must have made up a riddle of contradictions, which it was not in the power of that age to solve. In its ignorance it made a monster. Men are apt to see more than nature ever exhibits.