no work is so coarse, though none is so important, as
that which falls commonly into the hands of statesmen--instruments
strong in texture, and by reason of their rudeness not liable to sudden
impressions, may be the best. That it is which we mean when we declare
that a scrupulous man is impractical in politics. But the same man may,
at various periods of his life, and on various days at the same period,
be scrupulous and unscrupulous, impractical and practical, as the
circumstances of the occasion may affect him. At one moment the rule of
simple honesty will prevail with him. "Fiat justitia, ruat c[oe]lum."
"Si fractus illabatur orbis Impavidum ferient ruinae." At another he will
see the necessity of a compromise for the good of the many. He will tell
himself that if the best cannot be done, he must content himself with
the next best. He must shake hands with the imperfect, as the best way
of lifting himself up from a bad way toward a better. In obedience to
his very conscience he will temporize, and, finding no other way of
achieving good, will do even evil that good may come of it. "Rem si
possis recte; si non, quocunque modo rem." In judging of such a
character as this, a hard and fast line will certainly lead us astray.
In judging of Cicero, such a hard and fast line has too generally been
used. He was a man singularly sensitive to all influences. It must be
admitted that he was a vane, turning on a pivot finer than those on
which statesmen have generally been made to work. He had none of the
fixed purpose of Caesar, or the unflinching principle of Cato. They were
men cased in brass, whose feelings nothing could hurt. They suffered
from none of those inward flutterings of the heart, doubtful
aspirations, human longings, sharp sympathies, dreams of something
better than this world, fears of something worse, which make Cicero so
like a well-bred, polished gentleman of the present day. It is because
he has so little like a Roman that he is of all the Romans the most
attractive.

Still there may be doubt whether, with all the intricacies of his
character, his career was such as to justify a further biography at this
distance of time. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" asks Hamlet,
when he finds himself stirred by the passion thrown into the bare
recital of an old story by an itinerant player. What is Cicero to us of
the nineteenth century that we should care so much for him as to read
yet another book? Neverthel