whim of subsequent critics. His last biographer, striking a balance between the judgments of half a dozen others, says that he would have been more consistent if he had been less scrupulous. The moral instinct was too strong to allow him to resort to means of which his conscience disapproved. His standard of morality was as high as it was possible to elevate it by the mere light of nature. To fall below that standard made him feel dissatisfied with himself and ashamed. His constant aim was to do right, and his mistakes were those of his judgment rather than of his heart. The desire to please and be all things to all men was his misfortune, leading him to praise men whose characters he abhorred. His weakness showed itself again in his vanity, a harmless failing which did others less injury than it did Cicero good. One of the most forgiving of men he loved to say that his enmities were mortal, his friendships eternal. Feeling warmly he expressed himself strongly, and for this reason must have carried with his words the appearance of truth and sincerity, the first requisite in an orator, without which the graces of rhetoric may please, but are no better than curling smoke for effective conviction.

Quintilian gives, after all, as good a summary of his virtues as any when he says, "Though I acknowledge that Cicero stood at the head of eloquence.

yet

since he did not lay claim to the praise of perfection for himself-though he had no mean opinion of his own merits I may not unreasonably believe that the summit. of excellence was not attained by him. Notwithstanding no man has made nearer approaches to it." And he ends a whole chapter on the proposition that a great

orator must be a good man by saying, “I only wish to show that the definition of an orator, given by Cato, the

Censor, 'a good man skilled in speaking,' is a true definition."

X.

CICERO'S SUCCESSORS, AND QUINTILIAN.

THE

'HE age following Cicero's was marked by a long list of writers inferior in vigor and boldness to their predecessors, but surpassing them all, except Cicero, in finish and artistic skill. It was an age which dwelt upon words, when the impulse to great thoughts was removed. Augustus received an adulation which amounted to worship, accompanied by a willingness to surrender all political power into his hands. As a consequence the privileges and rights of the people were gradually abridged, and the loss was made up to them by abundance of food and amusement. As a further consequence literature became enervated, having, indeed, broad sympathies and great beauty of expression, which ran naturally into poetry and poetic prose. It was an age of poets and prose writers of an imaginative turnhistorians, philosophers, and moralists, who flattered Augustus and were in turn patronized by him.

Roman oratory sunk with liberty, and instead of the recent copious and flowing eloquence there succeeded a dry, guarded, sententious kind, full of labored terms and studied points, panegyrics, and servile compliments to tyrants.

This extreme refinement was not without an attempt at reaction, as is seen in the tendency toward absence of

literary finish on the part of a few; but it was only a variation of affectation, forming a pleasant relief to the high-wrought refinement which generally prevailed. It was simply a protest against the surfeit of good things. Another tendency, at the other extreme, was an overdoing of elaborate writing, and a substitution of rich diction for an ornamentation which was classic already, a gilding of gold, an overlaying of Greek simplicity with Asian magnificence, painting the perfect statue. Such was the character of literature in general, faring far better than the particular branch of it under consideration. For the very conditions which gave poetry and related prose a hot-house luxuriance withered and weakened oratory, which flourishes only in the bracing atmosphere of liberty.

In the curtailment of popular rights by the emperor, and a too willing hastening of them away by an amused populace the freedom of debate upon matters of public concern first fell into neglect. For of what use was it to discuss questions of state in the forum, when a council in secret session was deciding them beyond the power of the people to alter or modify its decrees? Nothing was left to eloquence except abstract discussions upon which it was next to impossible to employ itself. Meantime growing servility to the established despotism made it perilous to utter plain truths, as a few found whose traditions of the Republic compelled them to cry out against the growth of tyranny and luxury. Oratory, therefore, in these unfavoring circumstances, narrowed its sphere to those themes which were safe to discuss, and found its chief occupation in the forensic strife of the

courts.

In fact it was remanded to the position it occupied in its early days in Sicily, but without possessing the nobler attitude of a growing liberty under a waning or departed despotism. Instead freedom was on the wane, and tyranny was waxing stronger every day. Much of the oratory of the Augustan age had not even the motive of a civil suit at law to inspire it. The larger part of it was mere declamation in the schools of the rhetoricians, who continued to keep up its form without its power, an empty echo of the voices which were once lifted up in the cause of freedom in two nations. Pollio, a man who might have deserved a place among the illustrious ten, was restricted to noisy declamation of what were called "suasorial" pieces, among which was the probable speech of Leonidas to his three hundred at Thermopylæ, imagined and written out to be spoken by the members of his school. Thus oratory lived on in a sort of retrospective life, reproducing the traditions of the ancients, growing more and more formal and scholastic, growing less and less real and objective, having no particular object to secure. It became a mere art without motive or purpose and therefore, artificial and empty, until at Tiberius' accession in the year fourteen of our era it had well-nigh ceased to exist, or was confined to declamation of celebrated passages out of the old orators.

Now and then, in this general dearth of eloquence, a man like Celsus would appear and carry his hearers away by a native power and dignity, in spite of faults and carelessness of speech. And sometimes personal indignation would boil over against the tyrant; but such men