ower of law by means of which our judges are enabled to see that
their righteous decisions shall be carried out without detriment to
themselves--Cicero should have caused the delegates from Salamis
instantly to have deposited their money in the temple. Instead of doing
so, he had only declared the amount due according to his idea of
justice--in opposition to all Romans, even to Atticus--and had then
consented to leave the matter, as for some further appeal. Do we not
know how impossible it is for a man to abide strictly by the right, when
the strict right is so much in advance of all around him as to appear to
other eyes than his own as straitlaced, unpractical, fantastic, and
almost inhuman? Brutus wanted his money sorely, and Brutus was becoming
a great political power on the same side with Pompey, and Cato, and the
other "optimates." Even Atticus was interfering for Brutus. What other
Roman governor of whom we have heard would have made a question on the
subject? Appius had lent a guard of horse-soldiers to this Scaptius with
which he had outraged all humanity in Cyprus--had caused the councillors
of the city to be shut up till they would come to obedience, in doing
which he had starved five of them to death! Nothing had come of this,
such being the way with the Romans in their provinces. Yet Cicero, who
had come among these poor wretches as an unheard-of blessing from
heaven, is held up to scorn because he "trifled with equity!" Equity
with us runs glibly on all fours. With Appius in Cilicia it was utterly
unknown. What are we to say of the man who, by the strength of his own
conscience and by the splendor of his own intellect, could advance so
far out of the darkness of his own age, and bring himself so near to the
light of ours!

Let us think for a moment of our own Francis Bacon, a man more like to
Cicero than any other that I can remember in history. They were both
great lawyers, both statesmen, both men affecting the _omne scibile_,
and coming nearer to it than perhaps any other whom we can name; both
patriots, true to their conceived idea of government, each having risen
from obscure position to great power, to wealth, and to rank; each from
his own education and his nature prone to compromise, intimate with
human nature, not over-scrupulous either as to others or as to himself.
They were men intellectually above those around them, to a height of
which neither of them was himself aware. To flattery, to admirati