questions of the Chancellor of the Exchequer? They will be easily answered by a reference to the condition of the treasury. Will Mr. Gladstone be catechised on the subject of trade or commerce? He will refer the querist to the Chambers of Commerce at Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. Is Lord Palmerston to take the lead? By all means. Lord Aberdeen will inform him that the peace of the world is secure ; and the British flag respected wherever it is unfurled. So, also, with regard to the colonial policy of the present Government, this much, at least, is to be said for it, that, though not faultless, though very far from faultless, it is to the full as perfect as it used to be under the management, either of Lord Normanby or Lord John Russell. In a word, while we congratulate the cabinet on the very favourable circumstances under which they are about to meet the two houses of Parliament a few days hence, we are not less ready to offer to the statesmen in opposition the expression of our gladness, that they, also, are exempt from many causes of annoyances, and that, having little to find fault with in regard to things past, they will be more at leisure to devote their attention to the arrangement of wise measures for the future. And here we must use the freedom of reminding both sides of the House that there is ample work cut out for them. The general state of the country demands their gravest attention. We have too much wealth, as well as too much poverty, in the land: and the one and the other stand in too close a juxtaposition. Our union workhouses must be looked to, as well as our palaces; our peasantry cared for not less than our princes. The Church, also, is out of tune; Parliament must interfere, and compel harmony where at present there is discord. These, with many other points, on which we have not now time to touch, will furnish our legislators, both on the right and on the left, with ample subjects of consideration. And we earnestly trust that, in this season of profound peace, when the nation is prosperous, in the common acceptation of the term prosperity; when the most irrit able portion of it is in a fair way of subsiding into quiet; when railroads, pope's letters, and charitable bequests acts, are casting both Repeal and Federalism into the shade-when the sound of wheels, and cogs, and steam-engines, by land and sea, has put to silence all talk about the People's Charter, that the people's representatives will give up their time and care, to ameliorate the condition of the more helpless of their constituents, and so win for themselves a good name, and an easy return at the next general election, by the same process whereby they establish the queen's throne in the hearts and affections of her loyal subjects. London:-Moyes and Barclay, Castle Street, Leicester Square. BY MORGAN RATTLER, ESQ. M.A., AN APPRENTICE OF THE LAW. We take up the pen to redeem our promise to the gentle public of uttering a few words more about Horace's lyric effusions, and the best versions of them into English. We shall ramble, moreover, in our attempts at illustration as before, satisfied that the only readers we care to have will journey with us, not unpleasantly, throughout the digression, and return with us to the matter more immediately on hand, with a mind stored and a spirit elevated to its more perfect comprehension. We begin with the beginningwith the page begrimed with the smut and tears of the schoolboy who heartily wishes that there never had been kings to procreate and transmit in their line the friend and patron of our fat mannikin Horace. He that was addressed so nobly and so touchingly as "Mæcenas atavis edite regibus, O et præsidium et dulce decus meum," And the feeling in his day even was greatly respected; for fear is more potent upon mankind than love, and the very turba Remi looked with awe upon a man who, satisfied with wielding power, despised all the gewgaw splendour of title, station, and appliances, which, with the herd of make it reverenced by the multitude, men, must always accompany it, to high as well as low. By this manly policy he entirely diverted the sneers and sarcasms of the pure patricians, the haughty care of peculiar gods,— the dread proprietors seated within the mystical ager Romanus, which were so unsparingly directed against Cicero, who boasted a descent of (acsplendour - stirpe antiquissimâ ortus cording to himself) almost equal with the minister of Augustus; but who, in the vulgar opinion, stands chronicled as a word-mongering adventurer of obscure parentage and essentially low position, elevated only by adventitious circumstances, and rare oratorical powers in a convenacquainted with Sallust's narrative tional tongue. Every schoolboy is of the Catiline conspiracy. It is, very inappropriately, one of the first books learning there that Cicero was put into the hand of youth, and, from a novus homo, and an inquilinus civis urbis Roma, he takes for granted the orator was of low, if not of vile, birth and condition, and one of those per S sons whom the troublous times of the Republic could alone have thrown up pre-eminently to the surface. But of those schoolboys who have toiled over the "pictured page" of the illustrious historian, not one in a thousand has read the Treatise of the Laws, by the still more illustrious individual against whom Caius Crispus Sallustius has so successfully recorded his aristocratic spite. Yet the following beautiful dialogue opens the second book of the Treatise. The speakers are Marcus Tullius Cicero, his brother Quintus, and his friend Titus Cecilius Pomponianus Atticus: "Atticus. Sed visne, quoniam et satis jam deambulatum est, et tibi aliud dicendi initium sumendum est, locum mutemus, et in insulâ quæ est in Fibreno (nam opinor illi alteri flumini nomen esse *), sermoni reliquo demus operam, sedentes? "Marcus. Sanè quidem, nam illo loco libentissimè soleo uti, sive quid mecum ipse cogito, sive aliquid scribo, aut lego. "A. Equidem, qui nunc primum huc venerim, satiari non queo: magnificasque villas, et pavimenta marmorea et laqueata contemno, ductus vero aquarum, quos isti Nilos, Euripos, quis non cùm hæc videat irriserit ? Itaque, ut tu paulò antè de lege et jure disserens, ad naturam referebas omnia, sic in his ipsis rebus, quæ ad quietem animi, delectationemque quæruntur, natura dominatur. Quare antea mirabar (nihil enim in his locis nisi saxa et montes cogitabam: idque ut facerem, et orationibus inducebar tuis et versibus) scd mirabar ut dixi, te tam valdè hoc loco delectari; nunc contra miror te, cum Romà absis unquam potius esse. "A. Quæ tandem ista causa est? "M. Quia si verum dicimus, hæc est mea et hujus fratris mei germana patria, hinc enim orti stirpe antiquishic simâ sumus: hîc sacra, hic gens, majorum multa vestigia. Quid plura? Hanc vides villam, ut nunc quidem est latius ædificatam patris nostri studio: qui cum esset înfirmâ valetudine, hic ferè ætatem egit in litteris; sed hoc ipso in loco cùm avus viveret et antiquo more, parvus esset villa, ut illa Curiana in Sabinis, me scito esse natum. Quare inest nescio quid et latet in animo ac sensu meo, quo me plus hic locus fortasse delectet. Si quidem etiam ille sapientissimus vir, Ithacam ut videret, immortalitatem scribitur repudiasse." We are not aware that any translation of this has been given in our vernacular: we venture one: "Atticus. But would you not, since we have now walked about quite enough, and you have to enter upon another head, that we should shift our ground; and, seated at our case in that island of the Fibrenus (for such I fancy is the name of the second river), deal with the remainder of your discourse ? "Marcus. With great good will; for it is my most pleasant habitude to frequent that place, whether it be that all alone I meditate, or write, or read any thing. "A. In fact, I here, for the first time, cannot satiate myself. Your marble and channeled pavements I despise; and as to your aqueducts, which the fastidious style Niles and Euripuses, who can look at them without laughing? So it is that, even as you a little while ago, in dis "M. Ego verò cùm licet plures coursing of law and jurisprudence, dies abesse, præsertim hoc tempore anni et amoenitatem, et salubritatem hanc sequor; rarò autem licet; sed nimirùm me alia quoque causa delectat quæ te non attingit ita. referred all things to nature, thus do I say that, in all matters sought to soothe and gratify the mind, nature is supreme. Wherefore, whilst before I wondered (for nothing in this * The villa in the neighbourhood of which the scene is laid was near Arpinum. The second river alluded to was the Liris (Garigliano). Both are adverted to in Sil. Ital, lib. 8. Belli Punici : "Ac qui Fibreno miscentem flumina Lirim Sulphureum, tacitisque vadis ad littora lapsum + The large aqueducts, whether of fresh or salt water, were called after the mys terious river Nile, as it was to the ancients, and ever will be to those who live by its bounty on its banks; the smaller, Euripus after the strait, region did I dream of except rocks and mountains, and to prick me to this I was urged both by your speeches and poetry), I wondered, as I said, why you should be so much charmed with this place; now, on the contrary, I am loth to imagine how you, when once absent from Rome, could be better posited. "M. In sooth, I, when at this time of the year I have the privilege of a recess for some considerable time, forthwith betake myself to the sweetness and salubrity of this spot. Rare, however, is the license; but, indeed, the place delights me for another reason, which touches you not in like sort. “A. And what, then, is that reason? M. Because, sooth to say, this is mine and my brother's proper and natal soil; for hence have we sprung from a most ancient stock. Here was our race; here its rites; here many memorials of our ancestors. Why, more? You see this villa, as now, broadly built out by the care of my father, who, when in impaired health, here, for the most part, spent his age in studious ease. But on this very spot where my grandfather lived, and after the ancient manner, the villa was small, even like that Curiant one in the Sabine territory, where, be it known to you, I was born. Wherefore it is that there is a something, I know not what, privily influencing my mind and senses, which haply delights me with this place exceedingly; so as it even was with that wisest of men, who, as it is recorded, repudiated immortality that he might again see Ithaca." To us we confess, this, as all the introductions of Cicero to his philosophical works, is exquisitely beautiful, and displays him in a much more elevated, and estimable, and amiable light than when he comes before us as the orator, the administrator, and the politician. In the last capacity he was below contempt; he was that which Napoleon so thoroughly despised throughout life-an ideologist; and he was one of those helpless mockers out of season, who render themselves odious as gad-flies to their friends who are within the sphere of their annoyance, and a laughing-stock to the enemy; he was a bad and an inconvenient joker, and, still worse, he wanted pluck, which is the cardinal quality in all the actual affairs of life where the high game is played. Shakspeare, in one slight satiric touch, in his wonderful Roman play in the essence, Julius Cæsar, has shewn the character of the man. In the scene in the first act between Casca, and Brutus, and Cassius, the latter asks, "Did Cicero say any thing? "Casca. Nay, an' I tell you, that I'll ne'er look you in the face again. But those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was all Greek to me." This is much truer than Atkinson's notion of the philosopher's position, though expressed in such superb diction. Any body who chooses to look at the veritable gossip of Plutarch in his lives of the mighty contemporaries of this period, We know nothing of Cicero's father, except what he here tells us, from which we may conclude he was a rich and learned Italian, with the exception of some passages on bis death in a letter to Atticus. The allusion is to the famous Manius Curius Dentatus, of whom, in one of his Lays of Rome, Macaulay sings, "Hurra for Manius Curius, the noblest son of Rome, Thrice in utmost need called forth, Thrice drawn in triumph home. The third embroidered crown; And weave the third green crown.” Cicero, less reverentially, says elsewhere, that he was attracted to his domicile on the Ithacan rock (it was emphatically his domicile as the essence which constitutes it was most strong in him, namely the animus revertendi) by the venerable in this case, causa teterrima belli. He fled from the arms of Calypso, divine amongst goddesses — dia braw-et vetulam suam prætulit immortalitati, * may satisfy himself upon this. The secret of Marcus Tullius' success in his consulship against Catiline, Lentulus, Cethegus, and the other aristocratic conspirators, is, that in the gambler's phraseology, he, a stranger and no patrician, was not in the plot for remodelling the state, often attempted throughout the history of Rome, but signally by Scipio Ãfricanus of old, and at last successfully by the divus Julius. The fact of Cicero's consulship is a curiosity in the history of Rome-in comparison the effects were commonplace, the work of a multitude individually timid with the stranger for a stalking-horse-but the fact is most curious, and to none did it seem more so than to Marcus Tullius himself. Independently of his history in Latin and Greek of his consulship, he harped upon it so constantly, that it would seem as though it required some active exertion of memory and intellect to assure himself it was real. "Oh, fortunatam natam me consule Romam!" The fervid satirist exclaims,— "Si sic omnia dixisset ;" this "Antoni gladios potuit contemnere ;" and he talks of his verses as ridenda poëmata; and he lavishes praise on that cowardly pamphlet (it was no speech) of sonorous Billingsgate, the so-called conspicuæ divina Philippica famæ, for which Antony would have been justified in having the ribald word-monger kicked to death by spiders. Yet Cicero himself had a different opinion of his poetry, and it was known he was wont to quote complacently the gibbeted line, as well as the other equally notorious "Cedant arma toga, concedat laurea linguæ." We cannot say whether the oration attributed to him against C. C. Sallustius be genuine; but as to the following passage, it is in the feeling and spirit of the man's vanity, which "At quanto meliore loco Respublica staret, si tu par ac similis scelestorum civium una cum illis adnumeratus esses? An ego tunc falso scripsi, Cedant arma toga,' qui togatus armatos et pace oppressi? An illud mentitus sum, 'Fortunatam natam me consule Romam,' bellum qui tantum intestinum bellum et domesticum urbis incendium extinxi?" Assuredly the jingle of those wretched lines was sweet in the ears of the exquisite critic and philosopher. Alas for poor human nature! and he thought himself a poet. Solemnly, in the introduction to the first book of the Laws, he makes Atticus say,- "Lucus quidem ille et hæc Aspinatium quercus agnoscitur, sæpe à me lectus in Mario (Marius, a poem, by Cicero). Si manet illa quercus hæc est profecto; etenim est sane vetus." And Quintus, the brother, replies: "Manet verò, Attice noster, et semper manebit; sata est enim ingenio, nullius autem agricola cultu stirps tam diutur. na, quam poetæ versu seminari potest." And he adds afterwards : "Dum Latina loquentur litteræ, quercus huic loco non deerit, quæ Ma riana dicatur. Eaque ut ait Scævola de fratris mei Mario, 'Canescet sæclis innumerabilibus."" But, if the consulship haunted Cicero as a psychological surprise, it most peculiarly affected all the patricians as a grievance. On one occasion Torquatus, the descendant of him who tore the bloody chain from the neck of the gigantic Gaul slain in single fight in the sight of either army, taunted him as the third stranger who had reigned in Rome, Numa and Tarquinius being the two first. In reference to this, Cicero denied that men sprung from towns associated in the privileges of Rome should be considered strangers, and remarked that Cato the Censor, Co * As his colleague Caius Antonius, " pedibus æger," most decidedly was ; for none of that most gallant gens ever was other than "The foremost of the foremost, and the bravest of the brave," in any quarrel in which he really thought it right to fight. |