n orator.
Most of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of the
circumstances of his life. The treatises which we know as his
Philosophy--works which have been most wrongly represented by being
grouped under that name--can only be read with advantage by the light of
his own experience. There are two separate classes of his so-called
Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at
all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set of
treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching of the
old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the Academics,
and the De Finibus. From reading these, without reference to the
idiosyncrasies of the writer, the student would be led to believe that
Cicero himself was a philosopher after that sort. But he was, in truth,
the last of men to lend his ears

"To those budge doctors of the stoic fur."

Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his
weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn, poverty,
and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely contented
with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man; but of none has
it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To him ginger was always
hot in the mouth, whether it was the spice of politics, or of social
delight, or of intellectual enterprise. When in his deep sorrow at the
death of his daughter, when for a time the Republic was dead to him, and
public and private life were equally black, he craved employment. Then
he took down his Greek manuscripts and amused himself as best he might
by writing this way or that. It was a matter on which his intellect
could work and his energies be employed, though the theory of his life
was in no way concerned in it. Such was one class of his Philosophy. The
other consisted of a code of morals which he created for himself by his
own convictions, formed on the world around him, and which displayed
itself in essays, such as those De Officiis--on the duties of life; De
Senectute, De Amicitia--on old age and friendship, and the like, which
were not only intended for use, but are of use to any man or woman who
will study them up to this day. There are others, treatises on law and
on government and religion, which have all been lumped together, for the
misguidance of school-boys, under the name of Cicero's Philosophy. But
they, be they of one class or the other, re