At any rate we have learned to love it dearly,
though we may not practise it entirely. He also had learned to love it,
but not yet to practise it quite so well as we do. When it shall be said
of men truly that they are thoroughly sincere, then the millennium will
have come. We flatter, and love to be flattered. Cicero flattered men,
and loved it better. We are fond of praise, and all but ask for it.
Cicero was fond of it, and did ask for it. But when truth was demanded
from him, truth was there.

Was Cicero sincere to his party, was he sincere to his friends, was he
sincere to his family, was he sincere to his dependents? Did he offer to
help and not help? Did he ever desert his ship, when he had engaged
himself to serve? I think not. He would ask one man to praise him to
another--and that is not sincere. He would apply for eulogy to the
historian of his day--and that is not sincere. He would speak ill or
well of a man before the judge, according as he was his client or his
adversary--and that perhaps is not sincere. But I know few in history on
whose positive sincerity in a cause his adherents could rest with
greater security. Look at his whole life with Pompey--as to which we see
his little insincerities of the moment because we have his letters to
Atticus; but he was true to his political idea of a Pompey long after
that Pompey had faded from his dreams. For twenty years we have every
thought of his heart; and because the feelings of one moment vary from
those of another, we call him insincere. What if we had Pompey's
thoughts and Caesar's, would they be less so? Could Caesar have told us
all his feelings? Cicero was insincere: I cannot say otherwise. But he
was so much more sincere than other Romans as to make me feel that, when
writing his life, I have been dealing with the character of one who
might have been a modern gentleman.

CHAPTER XI.

_CICERO'S RHETORIC._

It is well known that Cicero's works are divided into four main parts.
There are the Rhetoric, the Orations, the Epistles, and the Philosophy.
There is a fifth part, indeed--the Poetry; but of that there is not
much, and of the little we have but little is esteemed. There are not
many, I fear, who think that Cicero has deserved well of his country by
his poetry. His prose works have been divided as I have stated them. Of
these, two portions have been dealt with already--as far as I am able to
deal with them. Of the Orations and Epistles I ha