ve of Cleopatra, he probably would have
succeeded to the imperial sceptre, for it was by the sword that he too
sought to suppress the liberties of the Senate and people. Against him,
as the enemy of his country, Cicero did not scruple to launch forth the
most terrible of his invectives. In thirteen immortal philippics--some
of which, however, were merely written and never delivered, after the
fashion of Demosthenes, with whom as an orator and a patriot he can
alone be compared--he denounced the unprincipled demagogue and general
with every offensive epithet the language afforded,--unveiling his
designs, exposing his forgeries, and proving his crimes. Nobler
eloquence was never uttered, and wasted, than that with which Cicero
pursued, in passionate vengeance, the most powerful and the most
unscrupulous man in the Roman Empire. And Cicero must have anticipated
the fate which impended over him if Antony were not decreed a public
enemy. But the protests of the orator were in vain. He lived to utter
them, as a witness of truth; and nothing was left to him but to die.

Of course Antony, when he became Triumvir,--when he made a bargain that
he never meant to keep with Octavius and Lepidus for a division of the
Empire between them,--would not spare such an enemy as Cicero. The
broken-hearted patriot fled mechanically, with a vacillating mind, when
his proscription became known to him,--now more ready to die than live,
since all hope in his country's liberties was utterly crushed. Perhaps
he might have escaped to some remote corner of the Empire. But he did
not wish for life, any more than did Socrates when summoned before his
judges. Desponding, uncertain, pursued, he met his fate with the heroism
of an ancient philosopher. He surrendered his wearied and exhausted body
to the hand of the executioner, and his lofty soul to the keeping of
that personal and supreme God in whom he believed as firmly as any man,
perhaps, of Pagan antiquity. And surely of him, more than of any other
Roman, could it be said,--as Sir Walter Scott said of Pitt, and as
Gladstone quoted, and applied to Sir Robert Peel,--

"Now is the stately column broke,
The _beacon light_ is quenched in smoke;
The trumpet's silver voice is still,
The warder silent on the hill."

With the death--so sad--of the most illustrious of the Romans whose fame
was not earned on the battlefield, I should perhaps close my lecture.
Yet it would be incomplete w