, we feel that the curtain
really has dropped because the great Republican drama is at an end. That
sad scene is the last scene of the fifth act of a tragedy that had been
in course of performance through five centuries. We cannot separate such
a man from his times. His private life is as nothing in comparison with
his public life. Private life belongs to comedy, and Cicero's history is
a tragedy, from first to last; and in reading any biography of him that
is prepared, we feel that we are reading Roman history,--and that is
written only in blood.

The part that Cicero had in the Roman Revolution, in that long
procession of events which terminated in the establishment of the
Empire, if not a lofty one, was nevertheless such as to render his
history painfully interesting. We see a man who was far above his his
contemporaries in moral excellence, and who sought to live well, tried
by circumstances beyond human strength. Cicero lived a century too
early, or a century too late. He would have been at his ease as the
contemporary and friend of Paulus AEmilius, but it was not in his nature
to be on fair terms with such men as Caesar and Pompeius, much less with
Antonius. Had he lived a century later, he might have been a calm
philosopher and scholar under the Imperial system. He was, of all men
that ever lived, of equal eminence for ability, the least adapted for a
revolutionary age; and yet it was his fortune to live in the time of the
greatest of all revolutions, and in its very focus, and to be a
prominent actor therein. It was as if Fortune had had a spite against
his house, and had concentrated all her vengeance on his head, by way of
rendering vain the most various and splendid talents that ever were
bestowed upon mortal man. Had Cicero's sense borne any proportion to his
intellectual powers, had he been endowed with a just portion of that
tact which is a more useful thing than genius in a world where they win
sixpences, he would have retired from public life on his return from
exile. But something very like vanity forbade that. He had been too
great to be able to imitate the sensible course of his friend, "the
voluptuous, but august Lucullus." He would keep the field which he had
won, and in which his part had been so brilliant; and the result was,
that he never knew a happy hour. But his miseries made him immortal. Who
would have cared for him, had he passed the last dozen years of his life
at his Formian villa? The re