a hundred and twenty years
ago, would have written a better work than Middleton's. To the man who
can afford time for the reading of but one of those Lives, we should
say, "Read Mr. Forsyth's,"--for it is by far the more accurate, and
therefore the more useful, life of the great Roman orator. But Mr.
Forsyth excels Dr. Middleton in accuracy for pretty much the same reason
that he can make the journey to Rome in less than half the time it
required Middleton to make it. The labors of others have cleared the way
for historians as well as for travellers; and to praise historians for
their superior accuracy would be about as sagacious as it would be to
praise travellers for their superior speed. We feel grateful to the
writers of former times, and we hold it to be the duty of all to do
those writers justice, even if their books should cease to be
authorities. Who would think contemptuously of Newton because he never
saw a steamship?

Mr. Forsyth aims to give his readers some account of Cicero's private
and domestic life, and in this respect his book has a positive
superiority to Middleton's. It is agreeable to read of the _vie privee_
of great men, and it is especially so in the case of such a man as
Cicero, who belonged to a people long since extinct, and who was himself
"the bright, consummate flower" of a civilization which exists only in
books, or in monuments, or in ruins,--a civilization of which it has
wisely been said, that it is the better for the world that it can never
know it again, "for it was rotten at the core, though most glorious in
the complexion." But, when all has been said of Cicero's private life
that can be said of it, we find ourselves going back to Cicero the
statesman, the orator, and the actor in some of the mightiest movements
that ever have shaken the world, and which continue to color our own
private lives at the end of almost two thousand years. If you would
write a book on Roman life and society, as such things were in the last
century of the Republic, Catulus, or any other member of the class of
_optimates_, would serve your purpose as well as Cicero. Men of the same
station live very much alike as to essentials. But no Roman can be named
who matches Cicero in some most important respects as a public man,--as
consul, as proconsul, as orator, as philosopher, as statesman, and as
mere politician. His history, therefore, is the history of Rome through
many eventful years; and when he is murdered