say nothing against the modern practice.
This would not be the place for such an argument. Nor do I say that, by
rules of absolute right and wrong, Cicero was right; but he was as
right, at any rate, as the modern barrister. And in reaching the
high-minded conditions under which he worked, he had only the light of
his own genius to guide him. When compare the clothing of the savage
race with our own, their beads and woad and straw and fibres with our
own petticoats and pantaloons, we acknowledge the progress of
civilization and the growth of machinery. It is not a wonderful thing to
us that an African prince should not be as perfectly dressed as a young
man in Piccadilly. But, when we make a comparison of morals between our
own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget that more should
be expected from us than from those who lived two thousand years ago.

There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf of
or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman life
than from any other source left to us. Much we may gather from Terence,
much from Horace, something from Juvenal. There is hardly, indeed, a
Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail
of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific. But the
pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter
things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be
true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the
greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class. I fear
that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell us more of the ways of
living then prevailing than the letters of Lady Mary W. Montagu or of
Horace Walpole. From the orations against Verres we learn how the people
of a province lived under the tyranny inflicted upon them; and from
those spoken in defence of Sextus Amerinus and Aulus Cluentius, we
gather something of the horrors of Roman life--not in Rome, indeed, but
within the limits of Roman citizenship.

It is, however, as a man of letters that Cicero will be held in the
highest esteem. It has been his good-fortune to have a great part of
what he wrote preserved for future ages. His works have not perished, as
have those of his contemporaries, Varro and Hortensius. But this has
been due to two causes, which were independent of Fortune. He himself
believed in their value, and took measures for their protection;