is felt by all who traverse the great circumstantial record of those tumultuous Roman times, viz. the Ciceronian epistolary correspondence. Upon coming suddenly into deep lulls of angry passions-here, upon some scheme for the extension of literature by a domestic history, or by a comparison of Greek with Roman jurisprudence; there, again, upon some ancient problem from the quiet fields of philosophy-literary men are already prejudiced in favour of one who, in the midst of belligerent partisans, was the patron of intellectual interest. But amongst Christian nations this prejudice has struck deeper: Cicero was not merely a philosopher; he was one who cultivated ethics; he was himself the author of an ethical system, composed with the pious purpose of training to what he thought just moral views his only son. This system survives, is studied to this day, is honoured perhaps extravagantly, and has repeatedly been pronounced the best practical theory to which pagan principles were equal. Were It only upon this impulse, it was natural that men should receive a clinamen, or silent bias, towards Cicero, as a moral authority amongst disputants whose arguments were legions. The author of a moral code 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 grounds of judgment, 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 confessealy 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

as

stones, not metaphorical, used figures of speech by a Clodian mob, we British understand the little comprehension of that rough horseplay 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 elec tioneering "rough and-tumbling" has long blunted the edge of our moral 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 in 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 colourable 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 connexions, 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 importations: and this age may be taken to have commenced in the youth of the Gracchi, about 100 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 specificrefutation,) 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 facetiæ 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 labour 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 παρρησια 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 every where. Fénélon, 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 fabting 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 subor nation 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 mala fortuna compositus," which is, after all, an ordinary spectacle for so much of the conflict as can ever be made public; but that of a man generally upright, matched as in single duel with a standing temptation to error, growing out of his public position; often seduced into false principles by the necessities of ambition, or by the coercion of self-consistency; and often, as he himself admits, biassed finally in a public question by the partialities of friendship. The violence of that crisis was overwhelming to all moral sensibilities: no sense, no organ, remained true to the obligations of political justice: principles and feelings were alike darkened by the extremities of the political quarrel: the feelings obeyed the personal engagements: and the principles indicated only the position of the individual-as between the senate struggling for interests and the democracy struggling for rights.

So far nothing has happened to Cicero which does not happen to all men entangled in political feuds. There are few cases of large party dispute which do not admit of contradictory delineations, as the mind is previously swayed to this extreme or to that. But the peculiarity in the case of Cicero is not that he has benefited by the mixed quality or the doubtfulness of that cause which he adopted, but that the very dubious character of the cause has benefited by him. Usually it happens, that the individual partisan is sheltered under the authority of his cause. But here the whole merits of the cause have been predetermined and adjudged by the

authority of the partizan. Had Cicero been absent, or had Cicero prac. tised that neutrality to which he often inclined, the general verdict of posterity on the great Roman civil war would have been essentially 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 Bernhard Abeken,† (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 Jeremy Bentham-cock, or an anticorn-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,