able essay. His correspondence
mirrors most faithfully his character. People are in the habit
of calling it interesting and clever; and it is so, as long as
it reflects the urban or villa life of the world of quality;
but where the writer is thrown on his own resources, as in exile,
in Cilicia, and after the battle of Pharsalus, it is stale
and emptyas was ever the soul of a feuilletonist banished from his
familiar circles. It is scarcely needful to add that such a statesman
and such a -litterateur- could not, as a man, exhibit aught else
than a thinly varnished superficiality and heart-lessness.
Must we still describe the orator? The great author is also a great man;
and in the great orator more especially conviction or passion
flows forth with a clearer and more impetuous stream from the depths
of the breast than in the scantily-gifted many who merely count
and are nothing. Cicero had no conviction and no passion;
he was nothing but an advocate, and not a good one. He understood
how to set forth his narrative of the case with piquancy of anecdote,
to excite, if not the feeling, at any rate the sentimentality
of his hearers, and to enliven the dry business of legal pleading
by cleverness or witticisms mostly of a personal sort;
his better orations, though they are far from coming up to the free
gracefulness and the sure point of the most excellent compositions
of this sort, for instance the Memoirs of Beaumarchais, yet form
easy and agreeable reading. But while the very advantages
just indicated will appear to the serious judge as advantages
of very dubious value, the absolute want of political discernment
in the orations on constitutional questions and of juristic deduction
in the forensic addresses, the egotism forgetful of its duty
and constantly losing sight of the cause while thinking
of the advocate, the dreadful barrenness of thought in the Ciceronian
orations must revolt every reader of feeling and judgment.

Ciceronianism

If there is anything wonderful in the case, it is in truth
not the orations, but the admiration which they excited. As to Cicero
every unbiassed person will soon make up his mind: Ciceronianism
is a problem, which in fact cannot be properly solved, but can only
be resolved into that greater mystery of human nature--language
and the effect of language on the mind. Inasmuch as the noble Latin
language, just before it perished as a national idiom, was once more
as it were comprehen