ty. Rightly
conceiving that everything patriotic was dignified, and that to
illustrate or polish his native language was a service of real and
paramount patriotism, he composed a work on the grammar and orthoepy of
the Latin language. Cicero and himself were the only Romans of
distinction in that age who applied themselves with true patriotism to
the task of purifying and ennobling their mother tongue. Both were aware
of a transcendent value in the Grecian literature as it then stood; but
that splendour did not depress their hopes of raising their own to
something of the same level. As respected the natural wealth of the two
languages, it was the private opinion of Cicero that the Latin had the
advantage; and, if Caesar did not accompany him to that length--which,
perhaps, under some limitations he ought to have done--he yet felt that
it was but the more necessary to draw forth any special or exceptional
advantage which it really had.

Was Caesar, upon the whole, the greatest of men? We restrict the
question, of course, to the classes of men great in _action_: great by
the extent of their influence over their social contemporaries; great by
throwing open avenues to extended powers that previously had been
closed; great by making obstacles once vast to become trivial, or prizes
that once were trivial to be glorified by expansion. I (said Augustus
Caesar) found Rome built of brick; but I left it built of marble. Well,
my man, we reply, for a wondrously little chap, you did what in
Westmoreland they call a good _darroch_ (day's work); and, if _navvies_
had been wanted in those days, you should have had our vote to a
certainty. But Caius Julius, even under such a limitation of the
comparison, did a thing as much transcending this as it was greater to
project Rome across the Alps and the Pyrenees,--expanding the grand
Republic into crowning provinces of i. France (_Gallia_), 2. Belgium, 3.
Holland (_Batavia_), 4. England (_Britannia_), 5. Savoy (_Allobroges_),
6. Switzerland (_Helvetia_), 7. Spain (_Hispania_),--than to decorate a
street or to found an amphitheatre. Dr. Beattie once observed that, if
that question as to the greatest man in action upon the rolls of History
were left to be collected from the suffrages already expressed in books
and scattered throughout the literature of all nations, the scale would
be found to have turned prodigiously in Caesar's favour as against any
single competitor; and there is no doubt w