tially different from that which we find in history. At present the error is an extreme one; and we call it such without hesitation, because it has maintained itself by imperfect reading, even of such documents as survive, and by too general an oblivion of the important fact, that these surviving documents (meaning the contemporary documents) are pretty nearly all ex parte.*

To judge of the general equity in the treatment of Cicero, considered as a political partisan, let us turn to the most current of the regular biographies. Amongst the infinity of slighter sketches, which naturally draw for their materials upon those which are most elaborate, it would be useless to confer a special notice upon any. We will cite the two which at this moment stand foremost in European literature that of Conyers Middleton, now about one century old, as the memoir most generally read; that of Bernhardt Abeken, †

* Even here there is a risk of being misunderstood. Some will read this term ex parte in the sense, that now there are no neutral statements surviving. But such statements there never were. The controversy moving for a whole century in Rome before Pharsalia, was not about facts, but about constitutional principles; and as to that question there could be no neutrality. From the nature of the case, the truth must have lain with one of the parties; compromise, or intermediate temperament, was inapplicable. What we complain of as overlooked is, not that the surviving records of the quarrel are partisan records, (that being a mere necessity,) but in the forensic use of the term ex parte, that they are such without benefit of equilibrium or modification from the partisan statements in the opposite interest.

† Cicero in Seinen Briefen, VoN BERNHARD RUDOLF ABEKEN, Professor am Raths-Gymnas, zu Osnabrüch. Hanover, 1835.

(amongst that limited class of memoirs which build upon any political principles,) accidentally the latest.

Conyers Middleton is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust. We sit down in perfect charity, at the same table, with sceptics in every degree. To us, simply in his social character, and supposing him sincere, a sceptic is as agreeable as another. Anyhow he is better than a craniologist, than a punster, than a St. Simonian, than a JeremyBentham-cock, or an anti-corn-law lecturer. What signifies a name? Free-thinker he calls himself? Good

let him free think' as fast as he can ; but let him obey the ordinary laws of good faith. No sneering. in the first place, because, though it is untrue that ‘a sneer cannot be answered,' the answer too often im

poses circumlocution. And upon a subject which makes wise men grave, a sneer argues so much perversion of heart, that it cannot be thought uncandid to infer some corresponding perversion of intellect. Perfect sincerity never existed in a professional sneerer; secondly, no treachery, no betrayal of the cause which the man is sworn and paid to support. Conyers Middleton held considerable preferment in the church of England. Long after he had become an enemy to that church, (not separately for itself, but generally as a strong form of Christianity,) he continued to receive large quarterly cheques upon a bank in Lombard-street, of which the original condition had been that he should defend Christianity with all his soul and with all his strength.' Yet such was his perfidy to this sacred engagement, that even his private or personal feuds grew out of his capital feud with the Christian faith.

6

From the church he drew his bread; and the labor of his life was to bring the church into contempt. He hated Bentley, he hated Warburton, he hated Waterland; and why? all alike as powerful champions of that religion which he himself daily betrayed; and Waterland, as the strongest of these champions, he hated most. But all these bye-currents of malignity emptied themselves into one vast cloaca maxima of rancorous animosity to the mere spirit, temper, and tendencies, of Christianity. Even in treason there is room for courage; but Middleton, in the manner, was as cowardly as he was treacherous in the matter. He wished to have it whispered about that he was worse than he seemed, and that he would be a fort esprit of a high cast, but for the bigotry of his church. It was a fine thing, he fancied, to have the credit of infidelity, without paying for a license; to sport over those manors without a qualification. As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial and incapable of labor. Even the Roman antiquities, political or juristic, he had studied neither by research and erudition, nor by meditation on their value and analogies. Lastly, his English style, for which at one time he obtained some credit through the caprice of a fashionable critic, is such, that by weeding away from it whatever is colloquial, you would strip it of all that is characteristic; removing its idiomatic vulgarisms, you would remove its principle of animation.

That man misapprehends the case, who fancies. that the infidelity of Middleton can have but a limited operation upon a memoir of Cicero. On the contrary, because this prepossession was rather a passion of

hatred than any aversion of the intellect, it operated as a false bias universally; and in default of any sufficient analogy between Roman politics, and the politics of England at Middleton's time of publication, there was no other popular bias derived from modern ages, which could have been available. It was the object of Middleton to paint, in the person of Cicero, a pure Pagan model of scrupulous morality; and to show that, in most difficult times, he had acted with a selfrestraint and a considerate integrity, to which Christian ethics could have added no element of value. Now this object had the effect of, already in the preconception, laying a restraint over all freedom in the execution. No man could start from the assumption of Cicero's uniform uprightness, and afterwards retain any latitude of free judgment upon the most momentous transaction of Cicero's life: because, unless some plausible hypothesis could be framed for giving body and consistency to the pretences of the Pompean cause, it must, upon any examination, turn out to have been as merely a selfish cabal, for the benefit of a few lordly families, as ever yet has prompted a conspiracy. The slang words 'respublica' and causa,' are caught up by Middleton from the letters of Cicero; but never,

*Hatred.'. It exemplifies the pertinacity of this hatred to mention, that Middleton was one of the men who sought, for twenty years, some historical facts that might conform to Leslie's four conditions, (Short Method with the Deists,) and yet evade Leslie's logic. We think little of Leslie's argument, which never could have been valued by a sincerely religious But the rage of Middleton, and his perseverance, illustrate his temper of warfare.

man.

V

in any one instance, has either Cicero or a modern commentator, been able to explain what general inter✔est of the Roman people was represented by these vague abstractions. The strife, at that era, was not between the conservative instinct as organized in the upper classes, and the destroying instinct as concentrated in the lowest. The strife was not between the property of the nation and its rapacious pauperismthe strife was not between the honors, titles, institutions, created by the state and the plebeian malice of levellers, seeking for a commencement de novo, with the benefits of a general scramble it was a strife between a small faction of confederated oligarchs upon the one hand, and the nation upon the other. Or, looking still more narrowly into the nature of the separate purposes at issue, it was, on the Julian side, an attempt to make such a re-distribution of constitutional functions, as should harmonize the necessities of the public service with the working of the republican machinery. Whereas, under the existing condition of Rome, through the silent changes of time, operating upon the relations of property and upon the character of the populace, it had been long evident that armed supporters - now legionary soldiers, now gladiators — enormous bribery, and the constant reserve of anarchy in the rear, were become the regular counters for conducting the desperate game of the more ordinary civil administration. Not the dema gogue only, but the peaceful or patriotic citizen, and the constitutional magistrate, could now move and exercise their public functions only through the deadliest combinations of violence and fraud. This dread