imes he would feel it to be
what it was--composed, for the most part, of men who were time-serving
and corrupt, willing to sell themselves for a price to any buyer; and
then, again, at times he would think of the Senate as endowed with all
those privileges which he names, and would dream that under his
influence it would become what it should be--such a Senate as he
believed it to have been in its old palmy days. His praise of the
Senate, his description of what it should be and might be, I have given.
To the other side of the picture we shall come soon, when I shall have
to show how, at the trial of Verres, he declared before the judges
themselves how terrible had been the corruption of the judgment-seat in
Rome since, by Sulla's enactment, it had been occupied only by the
Senators. One passage I will give now, in order that the reader may see
by the juxtaposition of the words that he could denounce the Senate as
loudly as he would vaunt its privileges. In the column on the left hand
in the note I quote the words with which, in the first pleading against
Verres, he declared "that every base and iniquitous thing done on the
judgment-seat during the ten years since the power of judging had been
transferred to the Senate should be not only denounced by him, but also
proved;" and in that on the right I will repeat the noble phrases which
he afterward used in the speech for Cluentius when he chose to speak
well of the order.[93]

It was on the Senate that they who wished well for Rome must depend--on
the Senate, chosen, refreshed, and replenished from among the people; on
a body which should be at the same time august and popular--as far
removed on the one side from the tyranny of individuals as on the other
from the violence of the mob; but on a Senate freed from its corruption
and dirt, on a body of noble Romans, fitted by their individual
character and high rank to rule and to control their fellow-citizens.
This was Cicero's idea, and this the state of things which he endeavored
to achieve. No doubt he dreamed that his own eloquence and his own
example might do more in producing this than is given to men to achieve
by such means. No doubt there was conceit in this--conceit and perhaps,
vanity. It has to be admitted that Cicero always exaggerated his own
powers. But the ambition was great, the purpose noble, and the course of
his whole life was such as to bring no disgrace on his aspirations. He
did not thunder against th