translations which he made of the great
speeches of AEschines and Demosthenes, De Corona. These translations are
lost, though the preface remains. He then translated, or rather
paraphrased the Timaeus of Plato, of which a large proportion has come
down to us, and the Protagoras, of which we have lost all but a sentence
or two. We have his Oratoriae Partitiones, in which, in a dialogue
between himself and his son, he repeats the lessons on oratory which he
has given to the young man. It is a recapitulation, in short, of all
that had been said on a subject which has since been made common, and
which owed its origin to the work of much earlier years. It is but dull
reading, but I can imagine that even in these days it may be useful to a
young lawyer. There is a cynical morsel among these precepts which is
worth observing, "Cito enim arescit lachryma praesertim in alienis
malis;"[139] and another grandly simple, "Nihil enim est aliud
eloquentia nisi copiose loquens sapientia." Can we fancy anything more
biting than the idea that the tears caused by the ills of another soon
grow dry on the orator's cheek, or more wise than that which tells us
that eloquence is no more than wisdom speaking eloquently? Then he wrote
the six Paradoxes addressed to Brutus--or rather he then gave them to
the world, for they were surely written at an earlier date. They are
short treatises on trite subjects, put into beautiful language, so as to
arrest the attention of all readers by the unreasonableness of their
reasoning. The most remarkable is the third, in which he endeavored to
show that a man cannot be wise unless he be all-wise, a doctrine which
he altogether overturns in his De Amicitia, written but four years
afterward. Cicero knew well what was true, and wrote his paradox in
order to give a zest to the subject. In the fourth and the sixth are
attacks upon Clodius and Crassus, and are here republished in what would
have been the very worst taste amid the politeness of our modern times.
A man now may hate and say so while his foe is still alive and strong;
but with the Romans he might continue to hate, and might republish the
words which he had written, eight years after the death of his victim.

I know nothing of Cicero's which so much puts us in mind of the
struggles of the modern authors to make the most of every word that has
come from them, as do these paradoxes. They remind us of some writer of
leading articles who gets together a sma