aking, no familiarity with the Forum, with the judgment-seats, and
the laws?"[107] "I know well how difficult the ground is. Let me advise
you to look into yourself, and to see whether you are able to do that
kind of thing. Have you got voice for it, prudence, memory, wit? Are you
able to expose the life of Verres, as it must be done, to divide it into
parts and make everything clear? In doing all this, though nature should
have assisted you"--as it has not at all, is of course implied--"if from
your earliest childhood you had been imbued with letters; if you had
learned Greek at Athens instead of at Lilybaeum--Latin in Rome instead of
in Sicily--still would it not be a task beyond your strength to
undertake such a case, so widely thought of, to complete it by your
industry, and then to grasp it in your memory; to make it plain by your
eloquence, and to support it with voice and strength sufficient? 'Have I
these gifts,' you will ask. Would that I had! But from my childhood I
have done all that I could to attain them."[108]

Cicero makes his points so well that I would fain go through the whole
speech, were it not that a similar reason might induce me to give
abridgments of all his speeches. It may not be that the readers of these
orations will always sympathize with the orator in the matter which he
has in hand--though his power over words is so great as to carry the
reader with him very generally, even at this distance of time--but the
neatness with which the weapon is used, the effectiveness of the thrust
for the purpose intended, the certainty with which the nail is hit on
the head--never with an expenditure of unnecessary force, but always
with the exact strength wanted for the purpose--these are the
characteristics of Cicero's speeches which carry the reader on with a
delight which he will want to share with others, as a man when he has
heard a good story instantly wishes to tell it again. And with Cicero we
are charmed by the modernness, by the tone of to-day, which his language
takes. The rapid way in which he runs from scorn to pity, from pity to
anger, from anger to public zeal, and then instantly to irony and
ridicule, implies a lightness of touch which, not unreasonably,
surprises us as having endured for so many hundred years. That poetry
should remain to us, even lines so vapid as some of those in which Ovid
sung of love, seems to be more natural, because verses, though they be
light, must have been labored