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Cicero, were consolidating the native prose style. Lastly, it is to their credit that, with an avidity which was as much greater as it was more respectable than the greed of acquisition which had stripped cities and temples, they had seized upon and assimilated the accumulated treasures of the Grecian tongue.

This first conjunction of the requisite accidents straightway produced its own first-fruits in the matchless collection of correspondence which it has bequeathed to us. Thus it is that Cicero has been well called the Father of Letter-writers.' Such a manifestation had never been possible before; it was inevitable as soon as it was possible. Though we may admit that the chief value of Cicero's letters is the basis they make for the history of their period, we must do this with a due sense that they are more; they are models of their style itself. They may not sparkle like Walpole's, to say nothing of Byron, who stands in brilliancy alone and apart-'e solo in parte vidi il Saladino'; they may lack the sober dignity of Gray, the pathos of Cowper, the vivacity and infinite variety of the lightsome and adorable Mrs Delany; still they form a marvellous and, on the whole, with due deference to Mommsen, a not altogether unpleasing self-portraiture. All the man is laid bare to us with a frankness more real and less calculated than Rousseau's. We see the alternations of courage with cowardice, of philosophy with fretfulness; we recognise the generosity, the meanness, and the impulsive Italian temperament in conflict with a self-debate by no means averse from intrigue. But we detect too the warm heart and the conscience never completely satisfied with the result of its own introspection, and never quite silenced by the clamour of an almost unrivalled and quite insatiable vanity.

At his worst, it must be conceded to Cicero, after a perusal of these letters, that he had a genuine love for republican institutions, and a no less genuine hatred of the more unscrupulous among the leaders of the party by which they were being too surely undermined. At the same time, his principles did not prevent him from being at one moment ready to dally even with a temptation to defend Catiline himself, and at another to accept a brief from the equally hateful Clodius. Towards such pitfalls of dishonour, which after all he avoided, he was doubtless

led in part by the professional instinct. But, if not in these cases, he discloses that in others he was decoyed into almost equally perilous adventure, now by vanity, now by fear, and again by a political opportunism that almost reached fatuity. It amuses and distresses us to watch him swinging, as on a pendulum, between adoration of Pompey and adulation of Cæsar, swayed by alternating suspicion and disillusion as to the character of the one and the projects of the other. It is his own correspondence between the years B.C. 68 and B.C. 43 which determines his claim to be considered a patriotic statesman and a man of political honour. The same period saw the production of the various treatises by which his place in the philosophic literature of his country was achieved. With these last we have nothing to do here; but it is worth while to say that, while his general love of letters is refreshing, the results of his strenuous and learned leisure, though not of the highest rank in philosophy, are still far above the level of desert implied in the epithet 'considerable.'

Cicero constantly displays a mind only half at ease about his public conduct. In a letter to Publius Lentulus Spinther he launches upon an elaborate defence of his compromise with the Triumvirs. The same letter contains an apologetic disquisition, rather Pitt-like than Gladstonian, on the value of political inconsistency. But it is to be observed that he does not countenance a change of goal, but only a change of route in altered circumstances. He certainly does not seem to sanction any such volte-face of opinion as those to which recent generations of Englishmen have become accustomed if not reconciled. In a still more remarkable epistle to his brother Quintus, he enlarges upon kindred matters. He insists that his letters are only distractions from his discontent. He has not the freshness of soul required for poetry. He had started with a high ideal; his aim had been, as he puts it, quoting the Iliad, alèv åρioтevelv kai ὑπείροχον ἔμμεναι ἄλλων. But he finds himself forced by circumstances into a change of party. His forensic ability, his main weapon in the battle of public life, has been diverted to base uses. He has left his real enemies, that is, those of his country, unattacked. He has even defended some of them, and gone too near to defending others.

Pompey and he are half estranged; Pompey has failed him, and he Pompey. Cæsar is said to love him, and he is disposed to love Cæsar; but that love is at best a suspected consolation, and smacks of humiliation and intrigue. The lament is noble and pathetic, and discloses a sadness which, since his time, must have repeated itself in many a man of lofty nature to whom the exigencies of public life have savoured of self-degradation.

The letters of his great period, not only those to Atticus and Quintus, but those also to his unsympathetic and unsuitable wife Terentia, to Cæsar, Pompey, Crassus, Appius Claudius Pulcher, and a miscellaneous group of less prominent acquaintances, form a kaleidoscope of human character. He lays himself, and them too, bare with a frankness greater than is compatible either with selfrespect or friendship. For himself, he lets us see him shivering with terror of the hired bravoes of the Clodian party, and sobbing along his oft-changed route on his way into exile. He tells us how many marble or bronze statues he bought under the auspices of Atticus, how little he loved them after he had bought them, and how ready he was to part with them again, if only there were a bit of profit to be made upon the bargain. He is as loud-tongued in his own praises as in his condemnation of others. He enlarges upon the splendour of his speeches; upon the effect which he produces in the senate and upon juries; and of course he never tires of referring to that immortal consulate. One of the worst blots upon his forensic fame he does worse than pass over. Not only does he never allude to his pitiful breakdown at Milo's trial, but he has even the audacity, when writing to the brother of Clodius himself, to call his actual speech on the occasion his 'vehement pleading' for Milo. And he had the still wilder temerity, if an old story can be believed, to send to Milo himself in his exile at Marseilles a copy of the really magnificent oration which he had prepared, but dared not deliver. How devoutly we may trust that its receipt really provoked that most graceful among all recorded retorts. Many thanks, my dear Cicero, for the copy of your speech on my behalf; I am truly glad that you did not deliver it, for, if you had, I should not now be eating the delicious mullets of this charming watering-place-this from a man justly con

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demned perhaps, but less than half defended, and who had doubtless paid his fees. A homicide possibly, but he must have been a gentleman. Does the story leave us able to say quite the same of Cicero?

A weakness in the historic value of the correspondence is that we never can be quite sure that he is giving us a trustworthy idea of his own opinion of his contemporaries. At all events we cannot trust what he says to them of themselves. His letters to Appius Claudius Pulcher, the brother of Publius Clodius, are fulsome. His references to Pompey and Cæsar, especially those contained in his letters to Atticus, both during his exile and from Cilicia, are self-contradictory, and bend to every breath of opportunism. It is not easy to believe that he thought as highly of his brother Quintus as he affected to think. He wrote, in phrases that have too much of the coo of the turtle-dove, to Terentia, at a time when they were reciprocally tired of each other, and indeed were all but legally divorced. Nor is it within the range of belief that he should have been beguiled so thoroughly as he pretended by the flippant half-wit of the dissolute and shallow Coelius Rufus.

His hesitation, unblushingly shown in the letters, as to his course upon the outbreak of open hostilities between Cæsar and Pompey was altogether discreditable. He never had any doubt as to which side he ought to take; his self-questioning was strictly limited as to the side which he had better take. He may have been wrong in supposing that the cause of the Republic was bound up with the success of Pompey; but he held that opinion without the slightest qualification. The letters make this abundantly clear; but they equally disclose the cause of his long sojourn at Formiæ while Pompey was in Epirus and Cæsar in Spain. It was not until exaggerated accounts of Cæsar's difficulties upon the river Segre reached Italy, that the timid and time-serving republican, whole-hearted but faint-hearted, finally set out to join the outclassed leader of the Optimates. Nothing could well go beyond his self-exposure here; in fact there is hardly anything like it in political literature. He evinces no compunction, no reserve, no sense of shame. It matters not that we may know now that, whether Pompey won or Cæsar, republican institutions were alike doomed.

It is the motive which actuated Cicero and too many of his friends, and which the correspondence discloses, that gives the moral sting to its preservation. It shows the political degradation to which the Roman oligarchy had fallen; a degradation which could only play the prelude to a new order of things.

As has been so often the case in history, modern and ancient, the class which is called 'Society' had, in that crisis of the fate of Rome, made a faulty estimate of the two great competitors. It backed the wrong horse, and 'plunged' upon Pompey. It was not till the very eve of their collision that the celerity, energy, and grasp of Cæsar seemed to strike even Cicero in contrast with the vacillation, lassitude, and incompetence of Pompey; and what was true of Cicero was doubly so of the well-placed, heavy-pated gentlefolk of Rome. It was the discontented, the rabble, and the discredited adventurers who took part with the genius of Cæsar and the veteran legions which that genius had trained.

It is the exposure of all this which makes the letters of Cicero and his correspondents a very treasure-house of history. It was the first of its kind to be built and stocked; and the world has never since inherited a richer. It is an archetype that has had no surpassing successor.

'Unde nil majus generatur ipso,

Nec viget quidquam simile aut secundum.'

An interpolated feeling of moral consolation is aroused by the letters written between the fall of Pompey and the assassination of Cæsar. It is much to recognise in these the noble discontent of Cicero's inner nature with the calm which succeeded Pharsalia. It refreshes us to mark how letter after letter shows that the personal security of life and fortune, which his opportunism had won and his truncated adherence to Pompey had not sufficed to throw away, was as nothing to him in comparison with his regret for liberty. Life, as he understood life, with its stress, its conflicts, its clash of ambitions, and its alternations of victory and defeat, was over. He laments like Othello when he felt his occupation gone. He sees that the highest magistrates have come to be mere officers of the Dictator; and that even the senate-house of Rome Vol. 204-No. 407

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