ance in Italy.

His Character

Thus oratorical authorship emancipated from politics
was naturalized in the Roman literary world by Cicero.
We have already had occasion several times to mention
this many-sided man. As a statesman without insight, idea,
or purpose, he figured successively as democrat, as aristocrat,
and as a tool of the monarchs, and was never more than
a short-sighted egotist. Where he exhibited the semblance of action,
the questions to which his action applied had, as a rule,
just reached their solution; thus he came forward in the trial
of Verres against the senatorial courts when they were already
set aside; thus he was silent at the discussion on the Gabinian,
and acted as a champion of the Manilian, law; thus he thundered
against Catilina when his departure was already settled,
and so forth. He was valiant in opposition to sham attacks,
and he knocked down many walls of pasteboard with a loud din;
no serious matter was ever, either in good or evil, decided by him,
and the execution of the Catilinarians in particular was far more
due to his acquiescence than to his instigation. In a literary
point of view we have already noticed that he was the creator
of the modern Latin prose;(34) his importance rests on his mastery
of style, and it is only as a stylist that he shows confidence
in himself. In the character of an author, on the other hand,
he stands quite as low as in that of a statesman. He essayed
the most varied tasks, sang the great deeds of Marius
and his own petty achievements in endless hexameters,
beat Demosthenes off the field with his speeches, and Plato
with his philosophic dialogues; and time alone was wanting for him
to vanquish also Thucydides. He was in fact so thoroughly a dabbler,
that it was pretty much a matter of indifference to what work
he applied his hand. By nature a journalist in the worst
sense of that term--abounding, as he himself says, in words,
poor beyond all conception in ideas--there was no department
in which he could not with the help of a few books have rapidly got up
by translation or compilation a readable essay. His correspondence
mirrors most faithfully his character. People are in the habit
of calling it interesting and clever; and it is so, as long as
it reflects the urban or villa life of the world of quality;
but where the writer is thrown on his own resources, as in exile,
in Cilicia, and after the battle of Pharsalus, it is stale
and empty