after,
had the same passion for _numerositas_, and the full, pompous
rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were
nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned realities, in
the forum or in the senate. What is the consequence? Why this--that,
whereas in the most laboured performance of Isocrates (which cost him,
I think, one whole _decennium_, or period of ten years), few modern
ears are sensible of any striking art, or any great result of harmony;
in Cicero, on the other hand, the fine, sonorous modulations of his
periodic style, are delightful to the dullest ear of any European.
Such are the advantages from real campaigns, from the unsimulated
strife of actual stormy life, over the torpid dreams of what the
Romans called an _umbratic_[17] experience.

[Footnote 17: 'Umbratic.' I have perhaps elsewhere drawn the attention
of readers to the peculiar effects of climate, in shaping the modes of
our thinking and imaging. A life of _inertia_, which retreats from the
dust and toil of actual experience, we (who represent the idea of
effeminacy more naturally by the image of shrinking from cold) call a
chimney-corner of a fireside experience; but the Romans, to whom the
same effeminacy more easily fell under the idea of shrinking from the
heat of the sun, called it an experience won in the shade; and a mere
scholastic student, they called an _umbraticus doctor_.]

_Isocrates_ I have noticed as the oldest of the surviving Greek
orators: _Demosthenes_, of course, claims a notice more emphatically,
as, by universal consent of Athens, and afterwards of Rhodes, of Rome,
and other impartial judges, the greatest, or, at least, the most
comprehensively great. For, by the way, it must not be forgotten--though
modern critics _do_ forget this rather important fact in weighing the
reputation of Demosthenes--he was not esteemed, in his own day, as the
greatest in that particular quality of energy and demoniac power
([Greek: deinotes]) which is generally assumed to have been his leading
characteristic and his _forte_; not only by comparison with his own
compatriots, but even with Cicero and the greatest men of the Roman bar.
It was not of Demosthenes that the Athenians were accustomed to say, 'he
thunders and lightens,' but of Pericles, an elder orator; and even
amongst the written oratory of Greece, which still survives (for as to
the speeches ascribed to Pericles by Thucydides, I take it for granted