med its place. It needed Cicero
himself to do that for her. It required the writing of such an essay as
this to show, by the fact of its existence, that Cicero the writer stood
quite as high as Cicero the orator. And then the written words remain
when the sounds have died away. We believe that Cicero spoke divinely.
We can form for ourselves some idea of the rhythm of his periods. Of the
words in which Cicero spoke of himself as a speaker we have the entire
charm.

Boccaccio, when he takes his queen into a grassy meadow and seats her in
the midst of her ladies, and makes her and them and their admirers tell
their stories, seems to have given rise to the ideas which Cicero has
used when introducing his Roman orators lying under a plane-tree in the
garden of Tusculum, and there discussing rhetoric; so much nearer to us
appear the times of Cicero, with all the light that has been thrown upon
them by their own importance, than does the middle of the fourteenth
century in the same country. But the practice in this as in all matters
of social life was borrowed from the Greeks, or perhaps rather the
pretence of the practice. We can hardly believe that Romans of an
advanced age would so have arranged themselves for the sake of
conversation. It was a manner of bringing men together which had its
attraction for the mind's eye; and Cicero, whose keen imagination
represented to him the pleasantness of the picture, has used the form of
narrative with great effect. He causes Crassus and Antony to meet in the
garden of Crassus at Tusculum, and thither he brings, on the first day,
old Mucius Scaevola the augur, and Sulpicius and Cotta, two rising
orators of the period. On the second day Scaevola is supposed to be too
fatigued to renew the intellectual contest, and he retires; but one
Caesar comes in with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and the conversation is
renewed. Crassus and Antony carry it on in chief, but Crassus has the
leading voice. Caesar, who must have been the wag among barristers of his
day, undertakes to give examples of that Attic salt by which the
profundity of the law courts is supposed to have been relieved. The
third conversation takes place on the afternoon of the second day, when
they had refreshed themselves with sleep; though Crassus, we are
specially told, had given himself up to the charms of no mid-day siesta.
His mind had been full of the greatness of the task before him, but he
will show neither fatigue nor anxie