of intelligence, the fault lies in the limited knowledge or discrimination of the writer, not in the importance of the subject. Were it in itself much less striking than it is, the varying medium through which each age perceives it, ought to bring out new lights, practically innumerable. Such a creation as a human mind, and one of the greatest the world has seen, cannot be less rich in the results it yields to the observer than the meanest of the works of Nature. We pause, perhaps, too long on a needless apology, and as in a previous Paper we attempted to analyse the character of another and the greatest of Romans, we now proceed to study that of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Observers on Cicero's character are commonly copious upon two principal faults, vanity and vacillation, which indeed often go together. The older writers seem to have been struck by his mocking, sarcastic spirit. A recent critic has almost with personal bitterness charged him with want of principle.

We shall, further on, consider these and other questions in detail; but for the sake of order, and because of the succession in which the phenomena of character develop themselves, we propose to examine, first the intellectual aspects of his mind, then the moral, under which also the political will range themselves,' and finally the religious, with which as yet political ideas were almost indissolubly united.

A man's intellectual character may be judged of, partly from the biography of his mind, the story of its development; partly from his mental achievements, but perhaps still more from what he constantly reverts to, from the pet objects worshipped in the inner sanctuary of his intellect rather than from those which practically he places before him as his public aim. Often he is greatly mistaken in the choice of these, but they still show his character, and even the more strongly so for that very reason. Of the grand general aim of the mind of Cicero, there can be no doubt; it was to attain to civil greatness by the only means by which at Rome in his day it could be reached, and that was eloquence. As often happens, the means itself became rapidly an end, and had there been no consulate to win, he would still have placed before him as his ideal excellence, the perfection of the faculty of public speaking. It was not that physically he seems to have peculiarly qualified for this attainment; on the contrary, like Demosthenes, he originally laboured under defects that might have discouraged any ordinary ambition, a shrill, badly modulated voice, and a weak chest, but there was that fire in him which difficulties, far from quenching, only kindle to greater energy. Whatever may have been his infirmity of purpose in other things, at least there was none in the choice of his end, and of the means to it, the

absence of which clearness of perception causes so many highlyendowed minds to miss their true destiny. There is a story that the future orator was told by the oracle of Delphi to make his own nature and not the opinions of others, his guide through life. So far as regarded the training of his genius, this advice was faithfully followed. Placing then eloquence before him as his proximate end, his elevated intellect also made him clearly discern the important principle that consummate excellence is not to be attained without an idea being constantly before the mind, that is, without the continual presence in the imagination of a degree of perfection as the object of aspiration, which it is known beforehand can never actually be realized. This is what he calls the "aliquid immensum, infinitumque." This it is which distinguishes genius from mere talent, which the painter, the poet, the sculptor, the architect, every creative artist must have before him, and which the lower, practical, though still highly useful and commendable working capability can seldom conceive. We say seldom, because there is something of this wherever very great excellence, in whatever grade, is found. Obviously there is less room for it where things can be reduced to number, measure, and weight; but even there deep and thoughtful minds will imagine a conceivable perfection beyond what given materials can ever exhibit, as we see in the hypotheses of mathematicians assuming a perfectly straight line, or a perfectly rigid body. To return to Cicero. His mind was filled with this idea of perfection; it haunted him day and night. But as a principle of self-education, this alone would be too exalted and too distant, though anything but vague or uncertain. To bring down the idea so as to make it an instrument of practice, it is necessary also to have before us the most perfect imitations of that idea. In painting, the works of the best artists showed even a Reynolds that there were achievements of art that might otherwise have seemed impossible. Mere beautiful imitations of the beauty of Nature, itself but an image of the unapproachable majesty of the Infinite and Unseen, give hints of the way of seeing truth, and of conveying it to the eyes and the minds of those who are either less gifted or have less patiently thought out what is possible for man to do.

The realized type which Cicero had placed before his mind at an early age, was the orator Crassus, as exhibited in a famous speech of his for the Servilian Law of Cæpio. This choice determined the character of his own eloquence, much as that of Demosthenes was decided by a similar admiration, at the beginning of his career, for the speech of the orator Callistratus in a dispute between the Athenians and Oropians; but doubtless the models differed as much as the two great developments

which they set in motion. Of eloquence there are in fact two leading classes, and, in a certain point of view, there cannot be more than two. One is that in which matter predominates, the other in which the main object is form. In the one the orator persuades, in the other he excites admiration and delight; the one is all business, the other all display; the one is argument and emotion as tending to action, the other expression and imagination as tending to a high mental gratification. Of both these classes the youthful Cicero had either witnessed, or knew by recent and living tradition excellent specimens in the two great orators of the generation before him, Antonius, and Crassus whom we have just mentioned. He appreciated both with equal truth and intensity, but the natural bias of his mind led him to give the preference, for his own purposes, to the latter. It was a preference that perhaps had been encouraged by many a friendly dispute in days of youth, with his brother Quintus, who took the other side, and each has been admirably set for thby Marcus himself in the splendid dialogue De Oratore. His favourite methods of oratorical study, as delivered in the person of Crassus, are such as to fall in with this view, and principally inculcate incessant use of the pen, artificial cultivation of the memory, and very extensive reading in all kinds of literature that form the taste and judgment, poetry, history, and philosophy. This habit of mind would alone be sufficient to make his eloquence characterized rather by display than by practical power, and so to render it less useful as a model for the parliamentary and forensic orator than might be expected from his name. We say less useful, but it does not follow because a great artist is not free from certain faults, or even mistaken principles, that the study of him may not give many a hint even to those who adopt a manner quite different from his. It is suggestive, and that which is suggested may be so widely different from the suggesting object, that the connection might quite escape an ordinary observer. To mention one thing, which is somewhat inconsistent with the prevailing idea about Cicero's vanity. The extraordinary finish which is apparent even to the most superficial reader, for example, in the Verrine orations, that splendour and lustre of diction, over and above and surpassing even mere beauty of language, which the words seem to give out by their choice and collocation, is a result which shows rather the reverse of vanity; which shows the artist forgetting himself, first in the interest and attention he bestows on his work, secondly in the respect which he pays to his audience who are to judge it. This is a point which conceited and idle speakers and writers are very apt to forget. With a little practice, it is an easy thing to speak fluently for

an hour, or to write a column or two of showy declamation. But more pains would be given to the business, if the composers had more deference to the opinions of those before whom it will come. True it is, that few of the latter are educated; it is also true that still fewer could themselves pretend to speak or to write. But a thinker like Cicero, and Aristotle before him, knew that the uneducated are far from deficient in critical power, and that a defect either in taste or in reasoning is as little likely to escape them, as a defect in conduct on the part of men who set up more or less for goodness escapes those who are anything but good themselves. And accordingly, Cicero places this truth among the foremost considerations which one who is endeavouring to make himself an orator ought to have upon his mind. He remarks, in the person of Crassus :

It is a great task and office, for a man to undertake and profess that he alone in a great assembly, when all are silent, is to be listened to on the most important subjects. For there is hardly a man present who does not see the faults of the speaker more sharply and keenly, than he does the passages that are free from fault. Any blunder, therefore, overwhelms even the parts that deserve praise.-De Orat. I. § 116.

Consistently, therefore, with this just and strong impression of the power even of a vulgar audience to perceive faults in speaking and reasoning, he describes Crassus and elsewhere himself also, as turning pale in the commencement of a speech, and quivering in every limb. This timidity, far from being ashamed of, he regards as inevitable in proportion to the perfection of the orator in his art; and if it be absent, the speaker, he thinks, deserves the charge of impudence; the best speaker is also the one who most dreads the difficulty of speaking and the various events a speech may have in its course, and the expectation which men have formed of him. In this spirit of humility, which ever accompanies high genius, we find him not wholly discouraging from the attempt at public speaking even those who seem not very well adapted by Nature for it, and mentions cases where a moderate proficiency in the art was of considerable use, as far as it went, in the attainment of that civil eminence to which every Roman citizen of any mark would be tempted to aspire.

The vice of ancient oratory consisted principally in its tendency to pass off into the processes of praise and blame, panegyric and invective, as opposed to the office of proving or persuading. This inclination is natural in proportion as States lose their freedom; and although this latter reason does not apply to most of the eloquence of Cicero, yet still he was formed in the schools of Greece during the period of their decline—not

in the great days of Pericles or of Demosthenes, but in times when the lecture-rooms of Rhodes or Athens had taken the place of the Pnyx or the Agora in training the aspirant to oratorical honour. The contrast accordingly is great between the masculine force of the speeches of Demosthenes and the verbal splendour of those of Cicero. Where Cicero is most at home, is in such a speech as that for the Manilian Law on the one hand, or in personal attacks like those on Catiline and Antonius on the other. In the former his highly-cultivated mind enables him to set forth in the most finished language what the ideal commander ought to be, and to exhibit Pompeius as its realization. In the latter, whilst no doubt there is abundance of personal animosity, there is still an absence of deep passion; there is not often that grandeur which we find even in the almost malignant fury of Demosthenes against Eschines, but the prevailing idea is still that of the great rhetorical artist mixing his colours, and simulating a greater intensity than he really feels. A proof of this is the difficulty which we conceive almost every reader must find in sympathizing with these attacks, a difficulty which certainly no competent student would ever complain of, when he applies himself to enter into the oration De Corona, or even the more subdued energy of that against Midias. Compared with these, the invectives of Cicero, with all their artistic power, wear an appearance of womanish spite, nay, of the "yelping pertinacity" which Hawkins so unjustly attributed to Pitt. He is more successful, at least to the judgment of a modern reader, in his sarcastic attacks of a lower degree of energy, such for example as his ridicule of the claim of Cæcilius to conduct the impeachment of Verres, where he can show the playfulness of genius, and the consciousness of immense professional superiority.

Cicero cannot be called, either in oratory or in philosophy, a powerful reasoner. He shows, indeed, in the former, the skilfulness which belongs to the mere advocate, and which was more readily tolerated by ancient than it is by modern, at least by English tribunals, in drawing off the mind of the audience from the real point at issue; of which the oration for Milo affords an example; but when there is occasion for a sustained search into political causes, for instance in discussing the construction and condition of the Catilinarian party, we do not see much evidence of the statesmanlike mind.

The view taken is but one on the surface; it exhibits nothing of that "winding into the subject like a serpent" which Goldsmith thought characteristic of Burke. We could hardly find a parallel in Cicero to the breadth and power of the picture Demosthenes gives of the political state of Greece before the