Would you make crime impossible to your sons? Would you inspire them
with the love of virtue? Rear them in the love of Tacitus. If they do
not become heroes at such a school, Nature must have created them base
or vile. A people who adopted Tacitus as their political gospel would
rise above the common stature of nations; such a people would enact
before God the tragical drama of mankind in all its grandeur and in all
its majesty. As to me, I owe to his writings more than the fibres of
the flesh, I owe all the metallic fibres of my being. Should our vulgar
and commonplace days ever rise to the tragic grandeur of his time, and
I become the worthy victim of a worthy cause, I might exclaim in dying,
"Give the honor of my life and of my death to the master, and not to
the disciple, for it is Tacitus that lived, and dies in me."




LXVI.


I was also a passionate admirer of orators. I studied them with the
presentiment of a man who would one day have to speak to the deaf
multitude, and who would strike the chords of human auditors. I studied
Demosthenes, Cicero, Mirabeau, and especially Lord Chatham,--more
striking to my mind than all the rest, because his inspired and lyrical
eloquence seems more like a cry than like a voice. It soars above his
limited audience and the passions of the day, on the loftiest wings of
poetry, to the immutable regions of eternal truth and of eternal
feeling. Chatham receives truth from the hand of God; and with him it
becomes, not only the light, but also the thunder of the debate.
Unfortunately, as in the case of Phidias at the Parthenon, we have only