s the story of his
death. And Antony is dead, and the Caesars. The last three had fallen in
the Marian massacres. There is but little now in the circumstances of
their death to excite our tears. Who knows aught of that Crassus, or of
that Antony, or of those Caesars? But Cicero so tells it in his pretended
narrative as almost to make us weep. The day was coming when a greater
than either of them was to die the same death as Antony, by the order of
another Antony--to have his tongue pierced, and his bloody head thrust
aloft upon the rostra. But no Roman has dared to tell us of it as Cicero
has told the story of those others. Augustus had done his work too well,
and it was much during his reign that Romans who could make themselves
heard should dare to hold their tongues.

It would be useless in me here to attempt to give any notion of the laws
as to speech which Cicero lays down. For myself I do not take them as
laws, feeling that the interval of time has been too great to permit
laws to remain as such. No orator could, I feel sure, form himself on
Cicero's ideas. But the sweetness of the language is so great as to
convince us that he, at any rate, knew how to use language as no one has
done since: "But there is a building up of words, and a turning of them
round, and a nice rendering. There is the opposing and the loosening.
There is the avoiding, the holding back, the sudden exclamation, and the
dropping of the voice; and the taking an argument from the case at large
and bringing it to bear on a single point; and the proof and the
propositions together. And there is the leave given; and then a
doubting, and an expression of surprise. There is the counting up, the
setting right; the utter destruction, the continuation, the breaking
off, the pretence, the answer made to one's self, the change of names,
the disjoining and rejoining of things--the relation, the retreat, and
the curtailing."[256] Who can translate all these things when Quintilian
himself has been fain to acknowledge that he has attempted and has
failed to handle them in fitting language?

And then at last there comes that most lovely end to these most charming
discourses: "His autem de rebus sol me ille admonuit, ut brevior essem,
qui ipse jam praecipitans, me quoque hac praecipitem paene evolvere
coegit."[257] These words are so charming in their rhythm that I will
not rob them of their beauty by a translation. The setting sun requires
me also to go to re