sed, and, in
Cicero's case, history has hardly yet made up its mind. He has been
lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present, in terms as
extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of his own orations;
both his accusers and his champions have caught the trick of his
rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence. Modern German
critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with hardly less
bitterness, though with more decency, than the historian Dio Cassius, who
lived so near his own times. Bishop Middleton, on the other hand, in those
pleasant and comprehensive volumes which are still to this day the great
storehouse of materials for Cicero's biography, is as blind to his faults
as though he were himself delivering a panegyric in the Rostra at Rome.
Perhaps it is the partiality of the learned bishop's view which has
produced a reaction in the minds of sceptical German scholars, and of some
modern writers of our own. It is impossible not to sympathise in some
degree with that Athenian who was tired of always hearing Aristides
extolled as "the Just;" and there was certainly a strong temptation to
critics to pick holes in a man's character who was perpetually, during
his lifetime and for eighteen centuries after his death, having a trumpet
sounded before him to announce him as the prince of patriots as well as
philosophers; worthy indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a
saint of the Catholic Church, but for the single drawback of his not
having been a Christian.

On one point some of his eulogists seem manifestly unfair. They say
that the circumstances under which we form our judgment of the man are
exceptional in this--that we happen to possess in his case all this mass
of private and confidential letters (there are nearly eight hundred of his
own which have come down to us), giving us an insight into his private
motives, his secret jealousies, and hopes, and fears, and ambitions, of
which in the case of other men we have no such revelation. It is quite
true; but his advocates forget that it is from the very same pages which
reveal his weaknesses, that they draw their real knowledge of many of
those characteristics which they most admire--his sincere love for his
country, his kindness of heart, his amiability in all his domestic
relations. It is true that we cannot look into the private letters of
Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we can into Cicero's; but it is not
so certain