ess, Hamlet was moved because the tale was
well told. There is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness, the
patriotism, and the tragedy of the man's life to move a reader still--if
the story could only be written of him as it is felt! The difficulty
lies in that, and not in the nature of the story.

The period of Cicero's life was the very turning-point of civilization
and government in the history of the world. At that period of time the
world, as we know it, was Rome. Greece had sunk. The Macedonian Empire
had been destroyed. The kingdoms of the East--whether conquered, or even
when conquering, as was Parthia for awhile--were barbaric, outside the
circle of cultivation, and to be brought into it only by the arms and
influence of Rome. During Caesar's career Gaul was conquered; and
Britain, with what was known of Germany, supposed to be partly
conquered. The subjugation of Africa and Spain was all but completed.
Letters, too, had been or were being introduced. Cicero's use of
language was so perfect that it seems to us to have been almost
necessarily the result of a long established art of Latin literature.
But, in truth, he is the earliest of the prose writers of his country
with whose works we are familiar. Excepting Varro, who was born but ten
years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a
name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re
Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose language we
regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace,
was born eight years after Cicero. In a great degree Cicero formed the
Latin language--or produced that manipulation of it which has made it so
graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle of thought. That which he
took from any Latin writer he took from Terence.

And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that unpremeditated
change in its form of government which resulted in the self-assumed
dictatorship of Caesar, and the usurpation of the Empire by Augustus. The
old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power became odious--the
name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power simply to the
nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The kings were
abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name of a
Republic, with its annual magistrates--at first its two Consuls, then
its Praetors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some current
event demanded a concentr