ution of Warren Hastings, who also was sustained by
powerful interests and families. The speech on the Manilian Law, when
Cicero appeared as a political orator, greatly contributed to his
popularity. I need not describe his memorable career,--his successive
elections to all the highest offices of state, his detection of
Catiline's conspiracy, his opposition to turbulent and ambitious
partisans, his alienations and friendships, his brilliant career as a
statesman, his misfortunes and sorrows, his exile and recall, his
splendid services to the State, his greatness and his defects, his
virtues and weaknesses, his triumphs and martyrdom. These are foreign to
my purpose. No man of heathen antiquity is better known to us, and no
man by pure genius ever won more glorious laurels. His life and labors
are immortal. His virtues and services are embalmed in the heart of the
world. Few men ever performed greater literary labors, and in so many of
its departments. Next to Aristotle and Varro, Cicero was the most
learned man of antiquity, but performed more varied labors than either,
since he was not only great as a writer and speaker, but also as a
statesman, being the most conspicuous man in Rome after Pompey and
Caesar. He may not have had the moral greatness of Socrates, nor the
philosophical genius of Plato, nor the overpowering eloquence of
Demosthenes, but he was a master of all the wisdom of antiquity. Even
civil law, the great science of the Romans, became interesting in his
hands, and was divested of its dryness and technicality. He popularized
history, and paid honor to all art, even to the stage; he made the
Romans conversant with the philosophy of Greece, and systematized the
various speculations. He may not have added to philosophy, but no Roman
after him understood so well the practical bearing of all its various
systems. His glory is purely intellectual, and it was by sheer genius
that he rose to his exalted position and influence.

But it was in forensic eloquence that Cicero was pre-eminent, in which
he had but one equal in ancient times. Roman eloquence culminated in
him. He composed about eighty orations, of which fifty-nine are
preserved. Some were delivered from the rostrum to the people, and some
in the senate; some were mere philippics, as severe in denunciation as
those of Demosthenes; some were laudatory; some were judicial; but all
were severely logical, full of historical allusion, profound in
philosophica