ne or two picked out by an unfavourable reviewer--say from 'Peter Bell'
or from the early version of the 'Miller's Daughter'--posterity would have
a very mistaken appreciation of their merits. Plutarch and the younger
Pliny, who had seen more of Cicero's poetry than we have, thought highly
of it. So he did himself; but so it was his nature to think of most of his
own performances; and such an estimate is common to other authors besides
Cicero, though few announce it so openly. Montaigne takes him to task for
this, with more wit, perhaps, than fairness. "It is no great fault to
write poor verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy
such poor verses were of his reputation". Voltaire, on the other hand, who
was perhaps as good a judge, thought there was "nothing more beautiful"
than some of the fragments of his poem on 'Marius', who was the ideal hero
of his youth. Perhaps the very fact, however, of none of his poems having
been preserved, is some argument that such poetic gift as he had was
rather facility than genius. He wrote, besides this poem on 'Marius', a
'History of my Consulship', and a 'History of my Own Times', in verse, and
some translations from Homer.

He had no notion of what other men called relaxation: he found his own
relaxation in a change of work. He excuses himself in one of his orations
for this strange taste, as it would seem to the indolent and luxurious
Roman nobles with whom he was so unequally yoked.

"Who after all shall blame me, or who has any right to be angry with me,
if the time which is not grudged to others for managing their private
business, for attending public games and festivals, for pleasures of any
other kind,--nay, even for very rest of mind and body,--the time
which others give to convivial meetings, to the gaming-table, to the
tennis-court,--this much I take for myself, for the resumption of my
favourite studies?"

In this indefatigable appetite for work of all kinds, he reminds us of no
modern politician so much as of Sir George Cornewall Lewis; yet he would
not have altogether agreed with him in thinking that life would be very
tolerable if it were not for its amusements. He was, as we have seen, of a
naturally social disposition. "I like a dinner-party", he says in a letter
to one of his friends; "where I can say just what comes uppermost, and
turn my sighs and sorrows into a hearty laugh. I doubt whether you are
much better yourself, when you can laugh as y