he has done in language which seems to be poetic now
as it was then--and because poetic, therefore not absurd. The length of
the year's period is an extravagance. You may call your space of time by
what name you will; it is long or short in proportion to man's life. He
tells us that we may not hope that our fame shall be heard of on the
other side of the Ganges, or that our voices shall come down through
many years. I myself read this dream of Scipio in a volume found in
Australia, and read it two thousand years after it was written. He could
judge of this world's future only by the past. But when he tells us of
the soul's immortality, and of the heaven to be won by a life of virtue,
of the duty upon us to remain here where God has placed us, and of the
insufficiency of fame to fill the cravings of the human heart, then we
have to own that we have come very near to that divine teaching which he
was not permitted to hear.

Two years afterward, about the time that Milo was killing Clodius, he
wrote his treatise in three books, De Legibus. It is, we are told, a
copy from Plato. As is the Topica a copy from Aristotle, written on
board ship from memory, so may this be called a copy. The idea was given
to him, and many of the thoughts which he has worked up in his own
manner. It is a dialogue between him and Atticus and his brother
Quintus, and treats rather of the nature and origin of law, and how law
should be made to prevail, than of laws as they had been as yet
constructed for the governance of man. All that is said in the first
book may be found scattered through his philosophic treatises. There are
some pretty morsels, as when Atticus tells us that he will for the nonce
allow Cicero's arguments to pass, because the music of the birds and the
waters will prevent his fellow-Epicureans from hearing and being led
away by mistaken doctrine.[308] Now and again he enunciates a great
doctrine, as when he declares that "there is nothing better than that
men should understand that they are born to be just, and that justice is
not a matter of opinion, but is inherent in nature."[309] He constantly
opposes the idea of pleasure, recurring to the doctrine of his Greek
philosophy. It was not by them, however, that he had learned to feel
that a man's final duty here on earth is his duty to other men.

In the second book he inculcates the observance of religious ceremonies
in direct opposition to that which he afterward tells us in his