s from that quarter. Cicero does not appear to have
made any dishonourable submission, and the conqueror's behaviour was nobly
forgetful of the past. They gradually became on almost friendly terms. The
orator paid the Dictator compliments in the Senate, and found that, in
private society, his favourite jokes were repeated to the great man, and
were highly appreciated. With such little successes he was obliged now to
be content. He had again taken up his residence in Rome; but his political
occupation was gone, and his active mind had leisure to employ itself in
some of his literary works.

It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him for
the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far more
natural sympathy. His dear daughter Tullia--again married, but unhappily,
and just divorced--died at his Tusculan villa. Their loving intercourse
had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief was for a
while inconsolable. He shut himself up for thirty days. The letters of
condolence from well-meaning friends were to him--as they so often are--as
the speeches of the three comforters to Job. He turned in vain, as he
pathetically says, to philosophy for consolation.

It was at this time that he wrote two of his philosophical treatises,
known to us as 'The True Ends of Life',[1] and the 'Tusculan
Disputations', of which more will be said hereafter. In this latter, which
he named from his favourite country-house, he addressed himself to the
subjects which suited best with his own sorrowful mood under his recent
bereavement. How men might learn to shake off the terrors of death--nay,
to look upon it rather as a release from pain and evil; how pain, mental
and bodily, may best be borne; how we may moderate our passions; and,
lastly, whether the practice of virtue be not all-sufficient for our
happiness.

[Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'--a title hard to translate.]

A philosopher does not always find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly
so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found
them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could
shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree
unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, as he
had done before, rather in the exciting struggle of public life than in
the special cultivation of any form of virtue; and he did not even find
the rem