e people was unbounded. Men of all ranks hailed him as the
savior of his country; thanksgivings to the gods were voted in his name,
and all Italy joined in enthusiastic praises.

(M1004) But he had now reached the culminating height of his political
greatness, and his subsequent career was one of sorrow and disappointment.
Intoxicated by his elevation,--for it was unprecedented at Rome, in his
day, for a man to rise so high by mere force of eloquence and learning,
without fortune, or family, or military exploits,--he became conceited and
vain. In the civil troubles which succeeded the return of Pompey, he was
banished from the country he had saved, and there is nothing more pitiful
than his lamentations and miseries while in exile. His fall was natural.
He had opposed the demoralising current which swept every thing before it.
When his office of consul was ended, he was exposed to the hatred of the
senators whom he had humiliated, of the equites whose unreasonable demands
he had opposed, of the people whom he disdained to flatter, and of the
triumvirs whose usurpation he detested. No one was powerful enough to
screen him from these combined hostilities, except the very men who aimed
at the subversion of Roman liberties, and who wished him out of the way;
his friend Pompey showed a mean, pusillanimous, and calculating
selfishness, and neither Crassus nor Caesar liked him. But in his latter
days, part of which were passed in exile, and all without political
consideration, he found time to compose those eloquent treatises on almost
every subject, for which his memory will be held in reverence. Unlike
Bacon, he committed no crime against the laws; yet, like him, fell from
his high estate in the convulsions of a revolutionary age, and as Bacon
soothed his declining years with the charms of literature and philosophy,
so did Cicero display in his writings the result of long years of study,
and unfold for remotest generations the treasures of Greek and Roman
wisdom, ornamented, too, by that exquisite style, which, of itself, would
have given him immortality as one of the great artists of the world. He
lived to see the utter wreck of Roman liberties, and was ultimately
executed by order of Antonius, in revenge for those bitter philippics
which the orator had launched against him before the descending sun of his
political glory had finally disappeared in the gloom and darkness of
revolutionary miseries.

(M1005) But we resume the