ing been found too honest, he had failed. There
can be no doubt that he had failed because he had been too honest. I
must have told the story of his political life badly if I have not shown
that Caesar had retired from the assault because Cicero was Consul, but
had retired only as a man does who steps back in order that his next
spring forward may be made with more avail. He chose well the time for
his next attack, and Cicero was driven to decide between three
things--he must be Caesarean, or must be quiet, or he must go. He would
not be Caesarean, he certainly could not be quiet, and he went. The
immediate effect of his banishment was on him so great that he could not
employ himself. But he returned to Rome, and, with too evident a
reliance on a short-lived popularity, he endeavored to replace himself
in men's eyes; but it must have been clear to him that he had struggled
in vain. Then he looked back upon his art, his oratory, and told himself
that, as the life of a man of action was no longer open to him, he could
make for himself a greater career as a man of letters. He could do so.
He has done so. But I doubt whether he had ever a confirmed purpose as
to the future. Had some grand Consular career been open to him--had it
been given to him to do by means of the law what Caesar did by ignoring
the law--this life of him would not have been written. There would, at
any rate, have been no need of these last chapters to show how
indomitable was the energy and how excellent the skill of him who could
write such books, because--he had nothing else to do.

The De Oratore is a work in three divisions, addressed to his brother
Quintus, in which it has undoubtedly been Cicero's object to convince
the world that an orator's employment is the highest of all those given
to a man to follow; and this he does by showing that, in all the matters
which an orator is called upon to touch, there is nothing which he
cannot adorn by the possession of some virtue or some knowledge. To us,
in these days, he seems to put the cart before the horse, and to fail
from the very beginning, by reason of the fact that the orator, in his
eloquence, need never tell the truth. It is in the power of man so to
praise--constancy, let us say--as to make it appear of all things the
best. But he who sings the praise of it may be the most inconstant of
mankind, and may know that he is deceiving his hearers as to his own
opinions--at any rate, as to his own pract