esire to
perpetuate a Republic which had done so much for them, and a courage
sufficient for the doing of some great deed, if the great deed would
come in their way. They went to Pharsalia, and Cato marched across the
deserts of Libya. They slew Caesar, and did some gallant fighting
afterward; but they were like a rope of sand, and had among them no
fitting leader and no high purpose.

Outside of these was Cicero, who certainly was not a fitting leader when
fighting was necessary, and who as to politics in general was fitted
rather by noble aspirations than supported by fixed purposes. We are
driven to wonder that there should have been, at such a period and among
such a people, aspirations so noble joined with so much vanity of
expression. Among Romans he stands the highest, because of all Romans he
was the least Roman. He had begun with high resolves, and had acted up
to them. Among all the Quaestors, AEdiles, Praetors, and Consuls Rome had
known, none had been better, none honester, none more patriotic. There
had come up suddenly in those days a man imbued with the unwonted idea
that it behooved him to do his duty to the State according to the best
of his lights--no Cincinnatus, no Decius, no Camillus, no Scipio, no
pretentious follower of those half-mythic heroes, no demigod struggling
to walk across the stage of life enveloped in his toga and resolved to
impose on all eyes by the assumption of a divine dignity, but one who at
every turn was conscious of his human duty, and anxious to do it to the
best of his human ability. He did it; and we have to acknowledge that
the conceit of doing it overpowered him. He mistook the feeling of
people around him, thinking that they too would be carried away by their
admiration of his conduct. Up to the day on which he descended from his
Consul's seat duty was paramount with him. Then gradually there came
upon him the conviction that duty, though it had been paramount with
him, did not weigh so very much with others. He had been lavish in his
worship of Pompey, thinking that Pompey, whom he had believed in his
youth to be the best of citizens, would of all men be the truest to the
Republic. Pompey had deceived him, but he could not suddenly give up
his idol. Gradually we see that there fell upon him a dread that the
great Roman Republic was not the perfect institution which he had
fancied. In his early days Chrysogonus had been base, and Verres, and
Oppianicus, and Catiline; but