nsive quality which may be said to lave been wanting
in his nature, which clouded his many excellences, led him continually
into false positions, and even in his delightful letters excites in the
reader, from time to time, an impatient feeling of contempt. He wanted
manliness. It was a quality which was fast dying out, in his day, among
even the best of the luxurious and corrupt aristocracy of Rome. It was
perhaps but little missed in his character by those of his contemporaries
who knew and loved him best. But without that quality, to an English mind,
it is hard to recognise in any man, however brilliant and amiable, the
true philosopher or hero.

The views which this great Roman politician held upon the vexed question
of the ballot did not differ materially from those of his worthy
grandfather before-mentioned.[1] The ballot was popular at Rome,--for many
reasons, some of them not the most creditable to the characters of the
voters; and because it was popular, Cicero speaks of it occasionally, in
his forensic speeches, with a cautious praise; but of his real estimate
of it there can be no kind of doubt. "I am of the same opinion now", he
writes to his brother, "that ever I was; there is nothing like the open
suffrage of the lips". So in one of his speeches, he uses even stronger
language: "The ballot", he says, "enables men to open their faces, and to
cover up their thoughts; it gives them licence to promise whatever they
are asked, and at the same time to do whatever they please". Mr. Grote
once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to the voting-papers of his day,
as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage--grand words,
and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding
English--"_Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis_"--"the tablet which
secures the liberty of silence". But knowing so well as Cicero did what
was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman voters, and how often
this "liberty of silence" was a liberty to take a bribe and to vote the
other way, one can almost fancy that we see upon his lips, as he utters
the sounding phrase, that playful curve of irony which is said to have
been their characteristic expression.[2] Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was
well pointed out by a writer in the 'Quarterly Review',[3] that in the
very next sentence the orator is proud to boast that he himself was not so
elected to office, but "by the living voices" of his fellow-citizens.

[Footnote 1: See p. 3.]