command a retreat. Ah, that, never! Fanaticism returned, the
legions begged to be punished.

Michelet says he would like to have seen him crossing Gaul,
bareheaded, in the rain. It would have been as interesting,
perhaps, to have watched him beneath the shade of the velarium
pleading the cause of Masintha against the Numidian king. Before
him was a crowd that covered not the Forum alone, but the steps of
the adjacent temples, the roofs of the basilicas, the arches of
Janus, one that extended remotely to the black walls of the Curia
Hostilia beyond. And there, on the rostrum, a musician behind him
supplying the la from a flute, the air filled with gold motes,
Caesar, his toga becomingly adjusted, a jewelled hand extended,
opened for the defence. Presently, when through the exercise of
that art of his which Cicero pronounced incomparable, he felt that
the sympathy of the audience was won, it would have been
interesting, indeed, to have heard him argue point after point--
clearly, brilliantly, wittily; insulting the plaintiff in poetic
terms; consigning him gracefully to the infernal regions;
accentuating a fictitious and harmonious anger; drying his
forehead without disarranging his hair; suffocating with the
emotions he evoked; displaying real tears, and with them a
knowledge, not only of law, rhetoric, philosophy, but of geometry,
astronomy, ethics and the fine arts; blinding his hearers with the
coruscations of his erudition; stirring them with his tongue, as
with the point of a sword, until, as though abruptly possessed by
an access of fury, he seized the plaintiff by the beard and sent
him spinning like a leaf which the wind had caught.

It would have bored no one either to have assisted at his triumph