s well as ancient, and which is not fit alike for Christians and
Pagans. A system of morality, we might have said, should be one which
would suit all men alike. We are bound to acknowledge that this will
suit only gentlemen, because he who shall live in accordance with it
must be worthy of that name. The "honestum" means much more in Latin
than it does in English. Neither "honor" nor "honesty" will give the
rendering--not that honor or that honesty which we know. Modern honor
flies so high that it leaves honesty sometimes too nearly out of sight;
while honesty, though a sterling virtue, ignores those sentiments on
which honor is based. "Honestum" includes it all; and Cicero has raised
his lessons to such a standard as to comprise it all. But he so teaches
that listeners delight to hear. He never preaches. He does not fulminate
his doctrine at you, bidding you beware of backslidings and of
punishments; but he leads you with him along the grassy path, till you
seem to have found out for yourself what is good--you and he together,
and together to have learned that which is manly, graceful, honest, and
decorous.

In Cicero's essays is to be found always a perfect withdrawal of himself
from the circumstances of the world around him; so that the reader shall
be made to suppose that, in the evening of his life, having reached at
last, by means of work done for the State, a time of blessed rest, he
gives forth the wisdom of his age, surrounded by all that a tranquil
world can bestow upon him. Look back through the treatises written
during the last two years, and each shall appear to have been prepared
in some quiet and undisturbed period of his life; but we know that the
last polish given by his own hands to these three books De Officiis was
added amid the heat and turmoils of the Philippics. It is so singular,
this power of adapting his mind to whatever pursuit he will, that we are
taught almost to think that there must have been two Ciceros, and that
the one was eager in personal conflict with Antony, while the other was
seated in the garden of some Italian villa meditating words by obeying
which all men might be ennobled.

In the dialectical disputations of the Greek philosophers he had picked
up a mode of dividing his subject into numbers which is hardly fitted
for a discourse so free and open as is this. We are therefore somewhat
offended when we are told that virtue is generally divided "into three
headings."[319] If it