it must be avowed, is convicted from his own
mouth of vanity, inconstancy, sordidness, jealousy, malice,
selfishness, and timidity. But on the other hand no character,
public or private, could thus bare its workings to our view
without laying a stronger claim to our sympathy, and extorting
from us more kindly consideration than we can give to the mere
shell of the human being with which ordinary history brings us in
contact. Cicero gains more than he loses by the confessions he
pours into our ear. We read in his letters what we should vainly
search for in the meagre pages of Sallust and Appian, in the
captious criticism of Dion, and even in the pleasant anecdotes of
his friendly biographer Plutarch, his amiableness, his refined
urbanity, his admiration for excellence, his thirst for fame, his
love of truth, equity, and reason. Much indeed of the patriotism,
the honesty, the moral courage he exhibited, was really no other
than the refined ambition of attaining the respect of his
contemporaries and bequeathing a name to posterity. He might not
act from a sense of duty, like Cato, but his motives, personal and
selfish as they in some sense were, coincided with what a more
enlightened conscience would have felt to be duty. Thus his
proconsulate is perhaps the purest and most honorable passage in
his life. His strict and rare probity amidst the temptations of
office arrests our attention and extorts our praise: yet assuredly
Cicero had no nice sense of honor, and was controlled by no
delicacy of sentiment, where public opinion was silent, or a
transaction strictly private. His courting his ward Publilia for
her dower, his caressing Dolabella for the sake of getting his
debt paid, his soliciting the historian Lucceius to color and
exaggerate the merits of his consulship, display a grievous want
of magnanimity and of a predominant sense of right. Fortunately
his instinct taught him to see in the constitution of the republic
the fairest field for the display of his peculiar talents; the
orator and the pleader could not fail to love the arena on which
the greatest triumph of his genius had been or were yet, as he
hoped, to be acquired. And Cicero indeed was not less ambitious
than Caeesar or Pompeius, Antonius or Octavius. To the pursuit of
fame he sacrificed many interests and friendshi