and
those who lived in his own time, and in the immediately succeeding ages,
entertained the same belief and took the same care. Livy said that, to
write Latin well, the writer should write it like Cicero; and
Quintilian, the first of Latin critics, repeated to us what Livy had
asserted.[27] There is a sweetness of language about Cicero which runs
into the very sound; so that passages read aright would, by their very
cadences, charm the ear of listeners ignorant of the language. Eulogy
never was so happy as his. Eulogy, however, is tasteless in comparison
with invective. Cicero's abuse is awful. Let the reader curious in such
matters turn to the diatribes against Vatinius, one of Caesar's
creatures, and to that against the unfortunate Proconsul Piso; or to his
attacks on Gabinius, who was Consul together with Piso in the year of
Cicero's banishment. There are wonderful morsels in the philippics
dealing with Antony's private character; but the words which he uses
against Gabinius and Piso beat all that I know elsewhere in the science
of invective. Junius could not approach him; and even Macaulay, though
he has, in certain passages, been very bitter, has not allowed himself
the latitude which Roman taste and Roman manners permitted to Cicero.

It may, however, be said that the need of biographical memoirs as to a
man of letters is by no means in proportion to the excellence of the
work that he has achieved. Alexander is known but little to us, because
we know so little of the details of his life. Caesar is much to us,
because we have in truth been made acquainted with him. But Shakspeare,
of whose absolute doings we know almost nothing, would not be nearer or
dearer had he even had a Boswell to paint his daily portrait. The man of
letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in
his mind is being declared to the world at large by himself; and if he
can so write that the world at large shall care to read what is written,
no other memoir will, perhaps, be necessary. For myself I have never
regretted those details of Shakspeare's life which a Boswell of the time
might have given us. But Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems
especially to require elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if
the character of the man be not known, and the incidents of his life.
His essays on rhetoric--the written lessons which he has left on the art
of oratory--are a running commentary on his own career as a