[Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine
likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be such,
but all are more or less apocryphal.]

[Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]

The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the
few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always
remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the
actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost perhaps
nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator
instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss
to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we
know--those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo--were
written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others
were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor is it certain that his
declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring
too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our
colder English taste. He looked upon gesture and action as essential
elements of the orator's power, and had studied them carefully from the
artists of the theatre. There can be no doubt that we have his own
views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his
"Brutus", in the treatise on oratory which bears that name. He protests
against the "Attic coldness" of style which, he says, would soon empty the
benches of their occupants. He would have the action and bearing of the
speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear,
should "know that there was a Roscius on the stage". He would have found a
French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1]
His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action.
The speaker, who, as we are told, "shuddered visibly over his whole body
when he first began to speak", was almost sure, as he warmed to his work,
to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.

[Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The
British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised,
_mutatis mutandis_, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago:
"You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands,
moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the lining
and sometimes the button, during the whole