tter, as he had the means,
at any rate, of reading it. He believed that the Marius, a poem written
by Cicero in praise of his great fellow-townsman, would live to
posterity forever. The story of the old man's prophecy comes to us, no
doubt, from Cicero himself, and is put into the mouth of his
brother;[37] but had it been untrue it would have been contradicted.

The Glaucus was a translation from the Greek done by a boy, probably as
a boy's lesson It is not uncommon that such exercises should be
treasured by parents, or perhaps by the performer himself, and not
impossible that they should be made to reappear afterward as original
compositions. Lord Brougham tells us in his autobiography that in his
early youth he tried his hand at writing English essays, and even tales
of fiction.[38] "I find one of these," he says, "has survived the
waste-paper basket, and it may amuse my readers to see the sort of
composition I was guilty of at the age of thirteen. My tale was entitled
'Memnon, or Human Wisdom,' and is as follows." Then we have a fair
translation of Voltaire's romance, "Memnon," or "La Sagesse Humaine."
The old lord, when he was collecting his papers for his autobiography,
had altogether forgotten his Voltaire, and thought that he had composed
the story! Nothing so absurd as that is told of Cicero by himself or on
his behalf.

It may be as well to say here what there may be to be said as to
Cicero's poetry generally. But little of it remains to us, and by that
little it has been admitted that he has not achieved the name of a great
poet; but what he did was too great in extent and too good in its nature
to be passed over altogether without notice. It has been his fate to be
rather ridiculed than read as a maker of verses, and that ridicule has
come from two lines which I have already quoted. The longest piece which
we have is from the Phaenomena of Aratus, which he translated from the
Greek when he was eighteen years old, and which describes the heavenly
bodies. It is known to us best by the extracts from it given by the
author himself in his treatise, De Natura Deorum. It must be owned that
it is not pleasant reading. But translated poetry seldom is pleasant,
and could hardly be made so on such a subject by a boy of eighteen. The
Marius was written two years after this, and we have a passage from it,
quoted by the author in his De Divinatione, containing some fine lines.
It tells the story of the battle of the eagle