cannot be supposed indifferent to the moral relations of his own party views. If he erred, it could not be through want of meditation upon the ground of judg ment, or want of interest in the results. So far Cicero has an advantage. But he has more lively advantage in the comparison by which he benefits, at every stage of his life, with antagonists whom the reader is taught to believe dissolute, incendiary, almost desperate citizens. Verres in the youth of Cicero, Catiline and Clodius in his middle age, Mark Antony in his old age, have all been left to operate on the modern reader's feelings precisely through that masquerade of misrepresentation which invariably accompanied the political eloquence of Rome. The monstrous caricatures from the forum, or the senate, or the democratic rostrum, which were so confessedly distortions, by original design, for attaining the ends of faction, have imposed upon scholars pretty generally as faithful portraits. Recluse scholars are rarely politicians; and in the timid horror of German literati, at this day, when they read of real brickbats and paving-stones, not metaphorical, used as figures of speech by a Clodian mob, we British understand the little comprehension of that rough horse-play proper to the hustings, which can yet be available for the rectification of any continental judgment. 'Play, do you call it?' says a German commentator; 'why that brickbat might break a man's leg; and this paving-stone would be sufficient to fracture a skull.' Too true: they certainly might do so. But, for all that, our British experience of electioneering roughand-tumbling' has long blunted the edge of our moral

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anger. Contested elections are unknown to the continent-hitherto even to those nations of the continent which boast of representative governments. And with no experience of their inconveniences, they have as yet none of the popular forces in which such contests originate. We, on the other hand, are familiar with such scenes. What Rome saw upon one sole hustings, we see repeated upon hundreds. And we all know that the bark of electioneering mobs is worse than their bite. Their fury is without malice, and their insurrectionary violence is without system. Most undoubtedly the mobs and seditions of Clodius are entitled to the same benefits of construction. And with regard to the graver charges against Catiline or Clodius, as men sunk irredeemably into sensual debaucheries, these are exaggerations which have told only from want of attention to Roman habits. Such charges were the standing material, the stock in trade of every orator against every antagonist. Cicero, with the same levity as every other public speaker, tossed about such atrocious libels at random. And with little blame where there was really no discretion allowed. Not are they true? but will they tell? was the question. Insolvency and monstrous debauchery were the two ordinary reproaches on the Roman hustings. No man escaped them who was rich enough, or had expectations notorious enough, to win for such. charges any colorable plausibility. Those only were unmolested in this way who stood in no man's path of ambition; or who had been obscure (that is to say, poor) in youth; or who, being splendid by birth or connections, had been notoriously occupied in distant

campaigns. The object in such calumnies was, to produce a momentary effect upon the populace: and sometimes, as happened to Cæsar, the merest falsehoods of a partisan orator were adopted subsequently for truths by the simple-minded soldiery. But the misapprehension of these libels in modern times originates in erroneous appreciation of Roman oratory. Scandal was its proper element. Senate or law. tribunal, forum or mob rostrum, made no difference in the licentious practice of Roman eloquence. And, unfortunately, the calumnies survive; whilst the state of things, which made it needless to notice them in reply, has entirely perished. During the transitional period between the old Roman frugality and the luxury succeeding to foreign conquest, a reproach of this nature would have stung with some severity; and it was not without danger to a candidate. But the age of growing voluptuousness weakened the effect of such imputations; and this age may be taken to have commenced in the youth of the Gracchi, about one hundred years before Pharsalia. The change in the direction of men's sensibilities since then, was as marked as the change in their habits. Both changes had matured themselves in Cicero's days; and one natural result was, that few men of sense valued such reproaches, (incapable, from their generality, of specific refutation,) whether directed against friends or enemies. Cæsar, when assailed for the thousandth time by the old fable about Nicomedes the sovereign of Bithynia, no more troubled himself to expose its falsehood in the senate, than when previously dispersed over Rome through the libellous facetia of

Catullus. He knew that the object of such petty malice was simply to tease him; and for himself to lose any temper, or to manifest anxiety, by a labor so hopeless as any effort towards the refutation of an unlimited scandal, was childishly to collude with his enemies. He treated the story, therefore, as if it had been true; and showed that, even under that assumption, it would not avail for the purpose before the house. Subsequently, Suetonius, as an express collector of anecdotage and pointed personalities against great men, has revived many of these scurrilous jests; but his authority, at the distance of two generations, can add nothing to the credit of calumnies originally founded on plebeian envy, or the jealousy of rivals. We may possibly find ourselves obliged to come back upon this subject. And at this point, therefore, we will not further pursue it than by remarking, that no one snare has proved so fatal to the sound judgment of posterity upon public men in Rome, as this blind credulity towards the oratorical billingsgate of ancient forensic license, or of лaqqnoia electioneering. Libels, whose very point and jest lay in their extravagance, have been received for historical truth with respect to many amongst Cicero's enemies. And the reaction upon Cicero's own character has been naturally to exaggerate that imputed purity of morals, which has availed to raise him into what is called a "pattern man.'

The injurious effect upon biographic literature of all such wrenches to the truth, is diffused everywhere. Fenelon, or Howard the philanthropist, may serve to illustrate the effect we mean, when viewed in relation

to the stern simplicity of truth. Both these men have long been treated with such uniformity of dissimulation, 'petted' (so to speak) with such honeyed falsehoods as beings too bright and seraphic for human inquisition, that now their real circumstantial merits, quite as much as their human frailties, have faded away in this blaze of fabling idolatry. Sir Isaac Newton, again, for about one entire century since his death in 1727, was painted by all biographers as a man so saintly in temper-so meek-so detached from worldly interest, that by mere strength of potent falsehood, the portrait had ceased to be human, and a great man's life furnished no interest to posterity. At length came the odious truth, exhibiting Sir Isaac in a character painful to contemplate, as a fretful, peevish, and sometimes even malicious, intriguer; traits, however, in Sir Isaac already traceable in the sort of chicanery attending his subornation of managers in the Leibnitz controversy, and the publication of the Commercium Epistolicum. For the present, the effect has been purely to shock and to perplex. As regards moral instruction, the lesson comes too late; it is now defeated by its inconsistency with our previous training in steady theatrical delusion.

We do not make it a reproach to Cicero, that his reputation with posterity has been affected by these or similar arts of falsification. Eventually this has been his misfortune. Adhering to the truth, his indiscreet eulogists would have presented to the world a much more interesting picture; not so much the representation of vir bonus cum malá fortuna compositus,' which is, after all, an ordinary spectacle for so much of the