t payments,
because he says that he wanted money. It was natural that he should
occasionally want money, and yet be in the main indifferent. The
incoming of a regular revenue was not understood as it is with us. A man
here and there might attend to his money, as did Atticus. Cicero did
not; and therefore, when in want of it, he had to apply to a friend for
relief. But he always applies as one who knows well that the trouble is
not enduring. Is it credible that a man so circumstanced should have
remained with those various sources of extravagance which it would have
been easy for him to have avoided or lessened? We are led to the
conviction that at no time was it expedient to him to abandon his
villas, though in the hurry-scurry of Roman affairs it did now and again
become necessary for him to apply to Atticus for accommodation. Let us
think what must have been Caesar's demands for money. Of these we hear
nothing, because he was too wise to have an Atticus to whom he wrote
everything, or too wary to write letters upon business which should be
treasured for the curiosity of after-ages.

To be hopeful and then tremulous; to be eager after success and then
desponding; to have believed readily every good and then, as readily,
evil; to have relied implicitly on a man's faith, and then to have
turned round and declared how he had been deceived; to have been very
angry and then to have forgiven--this seems to have been Cicero's
nature. Verres, Catiline, Clodius, Piso, and Vatinius seem to have
caused his wrath; but was there one of them against whom, though he did
not forgive him, his anger did not die out? Then, at last, he was moved
to an internecine fight with Antony. Is there any one who has read the
story which we are going to tell who will not agree with us that, if
after Mutina Octavius had thought fit to repudiate Antony and to follow
Cicero's counsels, Antony would not have been spared?

Nothing angers me so much in describing Cicero as the assertion that he
was a coward. It has sprung from a wrong idea of what constitutes
cowardice. He did not care to fight; but are all men cowards who do not
care to fight when work can be so much better done by talking? He saw
that fighting was the work fit for men of common clay, or felt it if he
did not see it. When men rise to such a pitch as that which he filled,
and Caesar and Pompey, and some few others around them, their greatest
danger does not consist in fighting. A man's t