saying to his friend--of the
stability of the Republic. When a matter so great is considered, how is
a man to trouble himself as to an individual who may die any day, or
cease from any accident to be of weight? Cicero was speaking of the
effect of this or that step on his own part. Am I, he says, for the sake
of Pompey to bring down hordes of barbarians on my own country,
sacrificing the Republic for the sake of a friend who is here to-day and
may be gone to-morrow? Or for the sake of an enemy, if the reader thinks
that the "hunc" refers to Caesar. The argument is the same. Am I to
consider an individual when the Republic is at stake? Mr. Froude tells
us that he reads "the words with sorrow and yet with pity." So would
every one, I think, sympathizing with the patriot's doubts as to his
leader, as to his party, and as to his country. Mr. Froude does so
because he gathers from them that Cicero is premeditating the murder of
Caesar!

It is natural that a man should be judged out of his own mouth. A man
who speaks much, and so speaks that his words shall be listened to and
read, will be so judged. But it is not too much to demand that when a
man's character is at stake his own words shall be thoroughly sifted
before they are used against him.

The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica on
Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the
first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of
Caesar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be
bought. The augurship would have bought him. "So pitiful," says the
biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honor,
his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious language
was the character of a great man ever offered up to public scorn. And on
what evidence? We should have known nothing of the bribe and the
corruption but for a few playful words in a letter from Cicero himself
to Atticus. He is writing from one of his villas to his friend in Rome,
and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the new consuls? Who is
to have the vacant augurship? Ah, says he, they might have caught even
me with that bait;[6] as he said on another occasion that he was so much
in debt as to be fit for a rebel; and again, as I shall have to explain
just now, that he was like to be called in question under the Cincian
law because of a present of books! This was just at the point of his
lif