n confiscated,
dismantled, and levelled to the ground, and his rents and revenues made
over to his enemies; that everything should have been done to destroy
him by the country he had served, except the act of taking away that
life which would thus have been made a burden to him. Would not his case
have been more piteous, a source of more righteous indignation, than
that even of the Mores or Raleighs? He suffered under invectives in the
House of Commons, and we sympathized with him; but if some Clodius of
the day could have done this to him, should we have thought the worse of
him had he opened his wounds to his wife, or to his brother, or to his
friend of friends?

Had Cicero put an end to his life in his exile, as he thought of doing,
he would have been a second Cato to admiring posterity, and some Lucan
with rolling verses would have told us narratives of his valor. The
judges of to-day look back to his half-formed purposes in this direction
as being an added evidence of the weakness of the man; but had he let
himself blood and have perished in his bath, he would have been thought
to have escaped from life as honorably as did Junius Brutus It is
because he dared to live on that we are taught to think so little of
him? because he had antedated Christianity so far as to feel when the
moment came that such an escape was, in truth, unmanly. He doubted, and
when the deed had not been done he expressed regret that he had allowed
himself to live. But he did not do it? as Cato would have done, or
Brutus.

It may be as well here to combat, in as few words as possible, the
assertions which have been made that Cicero, having begun life as a
democrat, discarded his colors as soon as he had received from the
people those honors for which he had sought popularity. They who have
said so have taken their idea from the fact that, in much of his early
forensic work, he spoke against the aristocratic party. He attacked
Sulla, through his favorite Chrysogonus, in his defence of Roscius
Amerinus. He afterward defended a woman of Arretium in the spirit of
antagonism to Sulla. His accusation of Verres was made on the same side
in politics, and was carried on in opposition to Hortensius and the
oligarchs. He defended the Tribune Caius Cornelius. Then, when he became
Consul, he devoted himself to the destruction of Catiline, who was
joined with many, perhaps with Caesar's sympathy, in the conspiracy for
the overthrow of the Republic. Caesar