nate or in the Forum. Caesar had put down all opposition, and was
made supreme over everything--till his death. The De Fato was written,
indeed, after he had fallen, but before things had so far shaped
themselves as to make it necessary that Cicero should return to public
life. So, indeed, were the three last moral essays, which I shall notice
in the next chapter; but in truth he had them always in his heart. It
was only necessary that he should send them forth to scribes, leaving
either to himself or to some faithful Tiro the subsequent duty of
rearrangement. But what a head there was there to contain it all!

CHAPTER XIII.

_CICERO'S MORAL ESSAYS._

We have now to deal with the moral essays of this almost inexhaustible
contributor to the world's literature, and we shall then have named
perhaps a quarter of all that he wrote. I have seen somewhere a
calculation that only a tenth of his works remain to us, dug out, as it
were, from the buried ruins of literature by the care of sedulous and
eager scholars. I make a more modest estimate of his powers. Judging
from what we know to have been lost, and from the absence of any effort
to keep the greater portion of his letters, I think that I do not
exaggerate his writing. Who can say but that as time goes on some future
Petrarch or some future Mai may discover writings hitherto unknown,
concealed in convent boxes, or more mysteriously hidden beneath the
labors of Middle-Age monks? It was but in 1822 that the De Republica was
brought to light--so much of it at least as we still possess; and for
more than thirty years afterward Cardinal Mai continued to reproduce,
from time to time, collections of Greek and Latin writings hitherto
unheard of by classical readers. Let us hope, however, that the zeal of
the learned may stop short of that displayed by Simon Du Bos, or we may
have whole treatises of Cicero of which he himself was guiltless.[306]

I can hardly content myself with classifying the De Republica and the De
Legibus under the same name with these essays of Cicero, which are
undoubtedly moral in their nature. But it may pass, perhaps, without
that distinct contradiction which had to be made as to the enveloping
the De Officiis in the garb of philosophy. It has been the combining of
the true and false in one set, and handing them down to the world as
Cicero's philosophy, which has done the mischief. The works reviewed in
the last chapter contained disputations on